Nathan Fielder may well have the best deadpan shtick since Buster Keaton. But, whereas Keaton offers stoic innocence, Fielder clinically probes other people’s misconceptions and delusions, which makes him a perfect match for Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes, the founder of Theranos, a Silicon Valley startup that purported to revolutionize blood testing, was convicted of four counts of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to more than eleven years in prison. In 2023, less than two months before the start of her sentence, she and her partner, Billy Evans, summoned Fielder to their beachfront house in Southern California and invited him to move in and film them in their domestic environment. The result is Fielder’s new documentary, “You Can See Everything,” which he co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, an experienced documentarian who also directed the recent drama “Primetime.”

One of my pet peeves with observational documentaries (including Oppenheim’s 2020 film, “Some Kind of Heaven”) is the elision of their transactional side: What do the movie’s on-camera participants expect to get from being filmed? There’s no such danger with “You Can See Everything.” Holmes states up front that she wants to correct the public narrative; she hopes that having the filmmakers in her house will enable her to be seen, as Evans puts it, with “radical transparency.” She says that she wants to present her story as “a human story”: “It starts with who I am and what my intent was and still is.” She claims to be innocent and appears bewildered by her fate. Fielder asks, with astonishment, whether she really thinks she committed no crime, and she responds, “I know I didn’t commit any crime.”

Fielder, of course, is no ordinary observational filmmaker; he has forged a TV career from drastic interventionism. His onscreen manner is based on affectlessly posing intrusive questions, and his shows involve real-life simulations akin to social-science experiments. (In his series “Nathan for You,” he forms faux businesses; in “The Rehearsal,” he directs participants in elaborate stagings of their real-life situations.) These features lend his work an air of cruelty, making people seem like specimens in the hands of a researcher bound by no scientific ethics or norms. The relationships are mainly ones of power, and he doesn’t let his subjects forget it.

In “You Can See Everything,” he doesn’t let Holmes forget it, either. He’s sarcastic to her and even embarrasses her in front of her parents, evidently assuming that, as her story is in his hands, she won’t dare push back. But Holmes’s preëxisting notoriety has its own power. Nothing Fielder discovers can top what’s already widely known, so his observations inevitably temper her public image. Fielder’s portrait of Holmes and his display of his methods turn his questioning to self-questioning, forcing him to assess, and even revise, basic assumptions about her and about life in general. The result is a movie of dazzling conundrums and vertiginous paradoxes, leading Fielder ever deeper into emotional and intellectual wilds. For all the unpleasantness of its backstory, its confrontations, its outcomes, and even, at times, Fielder’s own behavior, the film is more than fascinating and ingenious; it’s strangely, poetically, poignantly beautiful.

Fielder and Oppenheim started filming thirty-four days before Holmes was due to report to prison. She’s living in a large but not lavish house with Evans and their two children, a toddler and an infant whom she’s still breast-feeding. Most of the discussions take place in casual domesticity: in the kitchen, in a bedroom, in the baby’s room, on a sofa, outdoors on a deck. And, since the couple exhibits their “daily lives” with “radical transparency,” their relationship is as exposed to the filmmakers’ scrutiny as are matters of law. Fielder’s main idea, pursued from a variety of angles, is that, since Holmes is a convicted fraudster, it’s impossible to believe anything that she says. He wonders whether she’s trying to “scam” him or, for that matter, Evans.

Holmes and Evans are particularly incensed by a Times article that quotes her as saying, of her media portrayals, “They’re playing a character I created.” Holmes denies having said it, and the remark isn’t on the couple’s own recordings of the interviews in question, but, to their dismay, the article’s editor, after reviewing the journalist’s notes, stands by the reporting. Fielder becomes obsessed with this detail, seeing it as a test case for Holmes’s claims that she has been misrepresented in the media and that her memory is reliable. In the context of the shoot, however, Fielder’s pressure on the issue takes on an altogether different meaning. If Holmes, in her prior life, fabricated a persona for public consumption, might she not be doing the same now for Fielder and Oppenheim?

The revelations of “You Can See Everything” occur as much in the visual realm as in the verbal one. Multiple cameras set on tripods yield intently composed images that contrast with the spontaneity of the events they capture. (A downside is the movie’s snippety editing, which precludes the tension of continuous unfoldings.) The movie’s main diagnostic trope is the closeup: repeatedly, the filmmakers show Holmes speaking with wide-eyed, impulsive eagerness—her face filling the screen with seemingly irrepressible guilelessness—while Fielder’s blank gaze exudes mistrust and even derision.

Holmes portrays herself as a paragon of authenticity. When Fielder asks, “You’re being real right now?,” she responds, “I’m always being real.” Fielder, after an extremely long stare in closeup, asks whether she has ever told a lie. She says no but, when pressed, admits that she allows for white lies. Elsewhere, he insistently questions Holmes on her claims about Theranos’s blood-testing device: she says that she spoke the truth but was misinterpreted. Fielder counters that her assertions were unduly ambiguous. To explain his point, Fielder shows her a clip of Abbott and Costello doing their “Who’s on First?” routine. Holmes seems not to understand the wordplay that makes it funny. “She just thinks differently,” Evans says.

Rather than detailing the litany of specifics that cast doubt on Holmes’s credibility as an executive, Fielder and Oppenheim do what Holmes may or may not have claimed to do: they create a character, one whose main trait, of unshakable confidence that she possesses the truth and that her intent in speaking it is pure, is much more common in general social realms, such as politics and religion. Holmes is just one of many who think differently—true believers and conspiracy theorists, election deniers and cult members—and whose faith-based sense of truth is impervious to reason, putatively sincere, and, for those who share it, beyond question.

In “You Can See Everything,” the person who shares Holmes’s truth is Evans, and Fielder leans heavily on what he considers the transactional aspect of their relationship. After posing a folksy question to Evans about how he met Holmes—in 2017, it turns out, after the collapse of Theranos but before her indictment—Fielder brazenly asks, “And then she gets indicted for a crime, and you are choosing at the point to be, like, ‘O.K., this is what I want’?” When Evans speaks of his love for her, Fielder snarkily scoffs, “That’s cool,” and persists: “Weren’t you worried she was sort of, like, scamming you?” Evans speaks of the couple’s “trust,” the very word that Holmes uses about the relationship when Fielder separately interrogates her. The extent of that trust and Fielder’s skepticism about the uses to which it’s put eventually take over the movie.

In effect, “You Can See Everything,” which runs nearly three hours, is two ordinary-length movies placed one after the other, and the division that occurs midway through is itself a source of dramatic suspense. By the time Holmes is preparing to enter prison, the film hardly seems to have got going, leaving the viewer to wonder what will fill the screen time after the main character is gone. The specifics would be criminal to spoil. Suffice it to say that Fielder still wants to speak to Holmes, especially since he’s increasingly suspicious of Evans.

Fielder also makes contact with Amanda Seyfried, the actress who portrayed Holmes in a biographical miniseries, “The Dropout” (2022), and he probes the differences between that show, which, he learns, many viewers take as gospel truth, and his own project. Having started to doubt the nature of the relationship between Holmes and Evans, Fielder subjects it to extraordinary scrutiny, at which point the tables turn. Seyfried accuses him of being “protective” of Holmes; on the defensive, he claims that he’s just being “accurate.” This latter part of the film, with its labyrinthine maneuvers, its tangles of truth and emotion, proves startling, and it brings to mind the ending of an altogether different movie, Robert Bresson’s 1959 drama, “Pickpocket,” a Dostoyevskian love story clinched by a woman’s visit to an incarcerated criminal. Where Bresson projected Christian exaltation, “You Can See Everything” achieves something even more surprising: a rational sublimity, a twist of conceptual beauty, like an equation that proves the existence of love. ♦