A24 confirmed it the same night as the movie hit play, dropping a teaser and announcing an October theatrical release, which means the guessing game is over and the awards conversation has begun. With that release date, the studio has planted a 172-minute nonfiction epic squarely in this season’s documentary feature race — and it arrives as the rare title that critics and attendees started debating immediately after the credits finished.
Thirty-four days before she reported to prison, Holmes invited a skeptical crew inside her home to record her every move. What began as a portrait of a convicted felon became a three-year descent that A24’s own logline calls a journey “into the abyss.” Hollywood has chased the Theranos saga for years — Alex Gibney’s “The Inventor” got there in 2019, Hulu’s “The Dropout” won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy and a Jennifer Lawrence vehicle from Adam McKay collapsed before it could even start shooting — but no one has approached Holmes the way these two filmmakers do.
That is the first reason to take this seriously as a contender. Fielder is the most restlessly inventive nonfiction mind in television, coming off a second season of “The Rehearsal” that earned Peabody recognition and an Emmy nomination for writing and “You Can See Everything” is his feature directing debut. Oppenheim, meanwhile, is having the festival run of his life — his first scripted feature, the Robert Pattinson thriller “Primetime,” bowed in Venice to a rapturous response — and his nonfiction pedigree (“Some Kind of Heaven,” “Ren Faire,” “Spermworld”) gives the project a formal rigor that Fielder’s persona-driven work does not always foreground.
The pairing is the story. Two artists obsessed with how the camera warps the thing it records, turned loose on the most studied liar of the century.
In a documentary field where craft branches increasingly reward ambition, all three are legitimate below-the-line conversation starters.
You Can See Everything
Courtesy of A24
Then there is the thing itself, which plays less like a true-crime doc than a controlled experiment in whether a viewer can tell honesty from performance. Fielder does not stay behind the lens for long. Drawn into the frame by his subjects and by his own need to interject, he becomes the film’s destabilized center — a filmmaker visibly struggling, in real time, to work out whether he is being played.
There are obviously lingering questions about how much of it is “scripted” — which will spark debates over whether an acting nomination can come from such a movie, because the central performance that surprises in the film is, in fact, eligible for Oscar recognition, Variety has confirmed, although not for SAG.
A24 insiders see hurdles in the documentary branch, which is why they’re eyeing this film as a — wait for it — Best Picture play. And why the hell not?
With A24’s arsenal of contenders this year — which could include the summer hit “The Invite,” the Cannes breakout “Club Kid” and the Telluride debut smash “The Debut” — is there a real path for the indie studio to challenge the record for the most Best Picture nominations by a single studio in one year?
But the bigger record is hidden inside all of this.
The 172-minute runtime is a genuine ask. And there is the subject herself: Platforming a convicted fraudster, even to interrogate her, invites the accusation of handing Holmes a stage and any campaign will have to make the case — loudly — that the film indicts rather than rehabilitates.
The smartest defense is baked into the movie’s DNA. This is not a redemption tour. It is a study of the impossibility of ever knowing what is real, which is either the perfect subject for a branch that fetishizes authenticity or a provocation aimed straight at it.
A24 has the muscle to fight that fight. The studio has run documentary campaigns before and knows how to convert festival heat into a shortlist slot, and the fall precursor calendar gives it a runway — the Gotham Awards, the IDA Documentary Awards, Critics Choice Documentary, Cinema Eye Honors and the DGA’s documentary prize all feed the Oscar shortlist and a film this discussed will not want for coverage.
The October release is early enough to build, and the Fielder factor guarantees a level of press attention most nonfiction contenders would kill for.
“I’m not that person,” Holmes insists in the teaser. “I can promise you that.”
By the time the lights came up in Telluride, nobody in the room was sure whether to believe her.
