Documentaries Like Elizabeth Holmes’ You Can See Everything: Something feels rather uncomfortable about watching a person insist that they are telling you the truth while your brain is actually recollecting reasons and joining the dots while we continue watching them, rewinding, pausing, and thinking! We look at their faces and wonder if the smile was genuine, if that pause meant something rather obnoxious, if the person sitting in front of the camera knows something more than what they seem to be revealing.
Documentaries Like Elizabeth Holmes’ You Can See Everything
Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything (2026) takes the same question and does something strange: it follows the real Elizabeth Holmes. The documentaries like this one become fascinating not just because of the scandals, the lies or the people who somehow convince a room full of people to believe in them, but because they deal with the uncomfortable possibility that a camera can record someone’s every move and still leave us completely clueless about who they are.
If You Can See everything has actually left you wanting more documentaries that play with perception, feature fascinatingly complicated subjects or make you question the idea of objective storytelling itself, do not worry, we have got you covered!
Here are five documentaries worth adding to your watchlist!
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
To start with, we have Elizabeth Holmes herself, because we have a lot about Theranos and Holmes; it seems. Released in 2019, Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley examines the rise and fall of the company itself that Holmes had founded around the promise of revolutionary blood-testing technology.
What makes it interesting is You Can See Everything, and this gives a contrast between the Elizabeth Holmes we have in the two films. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley places her within the machinery, while the 2026 documentary approaches Holmes through a more intimate setting of her personal life. While one is interested in how the Theranos story became possible, the other asks what happens when the person at the centre of the story gives you a closer look into their world.
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley is a particularly good starting point if you want to understand the Theranos scandal before or after watching Fielder’s take on Holmes.
The Imposter
Bart Layton’s The Imposter tells the story of a teenager who disappears, and three years later, a young man appears in Spain claiming to be him. Despite the differences in appearance and accent, he was accepted by the missing boy’s family. The documentary investigates the extraordinary events surrounding the case and the questions that emerged when people began looking more closely. There is a particular kind of unease that the premise creates because the question is not simply how someone could lie about their identity but how that lie could become believable to other people.
If You Can See Everything makes you wonder whether intimate access to a subject can ever give full truth, The Imposter takes that anxiety to a different space, asking how much of our understanding of another person depends on the version of events we have already agreed to accept.
Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
Directed by Chris Smith, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened examines the 2017 music festival in the Bahamas, organised by entrepreneur Billy McFarland and promoted alongside rapper Ja Rule. The festival was marketed as an extravagant one, but apparently the reality fell short.
The reason that makes this documentary belong on this list is the machinery of belief behind it. There appears to be a familiarity about that dynamic. We have perhaps encountered versions of it, even if our own experiences involve less expense per se.
Capturing the Friedmans
Capturing the Friedmans, directed by Andrew Jarecki, follows a seemingly simple upper middle-class family whose world transforms when the father and youngest son are arrested and charged with shocking crimes.
The British Film Institute (BFI) describes the film as “troubling”, writing, “Deeply troubling and ambiguous, the film also hints at the notion of validation through video recording that has come to dominate 21st-century visual culture”.
The Act of Killing
This 2012 crime documentary challenges former Indonesian death-squad leaders to reenact their mass killings in the cinematic genre of their choice and includes “lavish musical numbers”, according to IMDb.
The film thus examines the stories the perpetrators tell about themselves, the images they construct and the habitat that has allowed them to celebrate their actions. This is not a story about a single controversial figure, but the historical violence at the centre is on a completely different scale.
The Camera Stops, But Questions Do Not
People perform; they remember things differently, leave things out, and sometimes they know precisely what they are doing. Filmmakers bring their own perspectives too, deciding where to point the camera, which moments to include and how to arrange the material into a story, and we participate in the whole thing by deciding what we believe.
Perhaps that is what makes the documentaries like You Can See Everything so compelling. We begin watching for some answers, stay back because the story is strange, people are fascinating, and we are convinced that if we pay attention, we will figure out things right; then the credits roll, and we are still arguing about what we saw, which is how documentaries truly work without hampering the truth attached and making us press play.
Which is your favourite that we missed? Tell us in the comments.
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