Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything has packed movie theaters and set records at the box office. It’s also kicked off a debate about, well, pretty much everything that happens on screen – including whether the film's subjects, notorious fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and her mysterious partner Billy Evans, can ever be trusted. Carter Sherman and Guardian arts writer Adrian Horton break down Horton's five-star review of the film, analyze Evans's most shocking moments and chart Holmes' trajectory from girlboss to (maybe) tradwife. They want to know: how did ideas about gender and sex shape this film? Contains spoilers

Nathan Fielder’s conversation-igniting film on the Theranos founder finds its darkest moments in her deceptive, Charlie Kirk-loving fiance Billy Evans

• Secrets, lies and a shock A-list cameo: how You Can See Everything became the film of the year

• ‘You can’t make this stuff up’: why we remain fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes

It’s likely that most audiences going into the surprise documentary smash You Can See Everything are familiar with either its nominal subject (and literal poster gal with an intense stare) Elizabeth Holmes, the tech founder serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors; or the film’s on-camera co-director Nathan Fielder. Holmes, as the movie points out, was all over the media as her company Theranos was hyped to the moon and then spectacularly imploded; she was also played by Amanda Seyfried in the well-regarded Hulu miniseries The Dropout. Fielder, meanwhile, may not have graced as many magazine covers, but is similarly familiar to prestige-TV acolytes from his comedy-reality series Nathan for You and its successor, the more reality-bending series The Rehearsal. A third figure not included in the film’s ad campaign becomes a key part of the film in the second half, and will also be familiar to many viewers.

This should leave Billy Evans as the odd man out. Evans, Elizabeth Holmes’s partner (she has said they’re not legally married, though they did get engaged in 2018, have two children and seem to treat each other as spouses), is a not-particularly-famous guy whose screen time competes with the other three well-known faces in what is essentially a four-character drama. But while Evans isn’t boxed out in terms of screen time or memorability, he does remain the odd man out in the sense that in all the discussion You Can See Everything has prompted about manipulation, shifting sympathies and who can or cannot be trusted, everyone seems to agree on one crucial point: Billy Evans sucks.

With You Can See Everything, Holmes joins other such high-profile subjects as Lance Armstrong, Imelda Marcos and Anthony Weiner to allow film-makers to document their lives. But do they ever come out well?

In You Can See Everything, convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes invites film-makers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into her home in a supposed act of “radical transparency”. Holmes is filmed, along with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two young children, in the weeks before starting a prison sentence for defrauding Theranos investors. “The best way for people to see who she is,” Evans says, “is to give as much access as possible into our daily lives”. It may also be the best way to market “Theranos 2.0”, which the couple are working on during filming. But the documentary questions whether Holmes is presenting her authentic self or a manufactured persona. Fielder speaks for the audience when he asks Holmes in a tense exchange whether she’s “being real” with him. “I’m always being real,” she says.

That question of authenticity is at the heart of documentary film-making. You Can See Everything is as much about the ambiguous relationship between film-maker and subject as it is about Holmes herself. There is often a power struggle over narrative control in documentaries, with both sides of the dynamic wanting different outcomes from the final film. Watching You Can See Everything inevitably prompts the question: why would Holmes, days before she heads to jail, invite the scrutiny of a film crew?

Tickets for film about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes said to be selling out after $15m opening weekend in the US

It is the film everyone seems to be talking about, spawning memes and fuelling feverish online debate about its subject, the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Now, a month before Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything reaches UK cinemas, tickets for screenings are already selling out after its remarkable $15m (£11.3m) opening weekend in the US.

The hit Elizabeth Holmes documentary led to increased interest in the award-winning narrative series on Hulu as well as Bad Blood, a 2018 book on the scandal

• ‘Stranger than stranger-than-fiction’: how Lance Oppenheim made the year’s two buzziest films

• ‘You can’t make this stuff up’: why we remain fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes

Interest in Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos fraud scandal has surged amid buzz for You Can See Everything, the record-breaking documentary on the disgraced former CEO.

Viewership for The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, surged by 186% in September compared with the month prior, according to Variety, after the announcement on 6 September of the previously secret film’s first teaser.

Nathan Fielder’s secretive Elizabeth Holmes documentary has become a sold-out smash hit and might make Oscars history

Spoilers ahead

If there is one moment that sums up You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary on Elizabeth Holmes that until this weekend was shrouded in spoiler-averse secrecy, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the one everyone already knows: co-director Nathan Fielder, the droll comedian known for deadpanning subjects into submission, sitting eye to eye with Holmes, the unblinking fabulist of Theranos infamy. In tight zoom, saturation turned up – Fielder’s arched brows and Holmes’s oceanic blue eyes as stark as two magnetic poles – he asks her: “Are you being real right now?”

That question hangs over much of the colossal three-hour movie, particularly a claustrophobic first half that has made headlines since the film’s existence was announced in September. That first half – essentially, the only part of the movie anyone respecting spoiler guidelines and/or the theatrical experience could talk about – takes place entirely in 2023, when Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim, along with a small crew, embedded with Holmes, her husband, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the run-up to her prison sentence for fraud. We watch as Fielder, over a few surreal weeks in a beachfront rental, attempts to puncture Holmes’s indomitable facade of faultlessness. It’s not exactly comedic, this chess game between three norms-ignoring people, but it can be quite funny: TV’s grand illusionist, an absurdist auteur who will go as far as actually obtaining a 737 pilot’s license for the bit, stymied by a world-class fabricator, with her poorly dissembling husband on the side. This section resembles, in feel, the pull of an internet wormhole: the closer you zoom in on a subject, without outside context, the more sense devolves. Was Holmes “being real”, for instance, when she told Fielder, with seemingly complete sincerity, that she has never told a lie in her life? Or when she continued to insist, despite plain reality, that Theranos devices could perform 1,000 diagnostic tests?

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s headspinning documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is an unprecedented critical success – even with a three-hour runtime

Name: The best reviewed film in history.

Age: Not even out yet, except in the US and Canada.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s buzzy film was shown on only 855 screens in the biggest documentary opening in North America since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004

Nathan Fielder’s nearly three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, has opened to an extraordinary $15m domestic box office, the biggest opening weekend for a documentary in North America in more than 20 years.

You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, made $15m (A$21.5m, £11.2m) from only 855 screens, and had more than 2,000 sold-out screenings at the weekend, according to the production company A24. It is the biggest opening for a film playing on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat opened to $26.5m in 2006.

The entrepreneur turned fraudster is the subject of an Oscar-tipped new documentary that takes an unusual look at her strange legacy

David Agus’s first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference came as a shock. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was altogether different.

“The accent changed: this deep voice, very serious,” Agus, a medical oncologist, recalls by phone from Los Angeles. “It was as if I had met a person and then interviewed a separate person. That transition from the green room to the stage – I had never experienced something like that before.”

New York film festival: No spoilers here – TV’s grand illusionist meets his match when he moves in with Theranos founder and her family

For anyone remotely near the worlds of documentary, comedy or medical fraud, there has been one thing on the mind for weeks now: a single-minute clip of Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian whose boundary-pushing HBO series The Rehearsal cemented his status as docu-reality’s premier auteur, staring into the deep blue eyes of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the blood-testing startup Theranos. Unblinking, faces inches apart, the famously dry purveyor of harebrained business schemes and the convicted fraudster appeared locked in a battle of wills. “Are you being real right now?” Fielder asked her, in a classically meta bit – could Fielder really have spent years filming a secret documentary with one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious pariahs?

The prospect of TV’s grand illusionist versus emblematic girl-boss scammer seemed potentially too good to be true; buzz for You Can See Everything, Fielder’s furtive documentary co-directed with wunderkind du jour Lance Oppenheim (whose narrative feature debut, the Robert Pattinson-starring Primetime, premiered last month) was such that access to the film’s New York film festival premiere on Wednesday became this fall’s hottest ticket.

From David Bowie being reincarnated as a kettle to Reese Witherspoon in space, our writers list the TV head-scratchers they can’t get enough of

With a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you with any degree of accuracy what Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company is actually about. In terms of straight plot, it’s the story of a man who is drawn into a conspiracy after a chair breaks when he sits on it. But beyond that, it’s honestly anyone’s guess.