The question everybody's asking about "You Can See Everything" is whether Elizabeth Holmes is a con artist. At one point Nathan Fielder sets it up that way himself, with something close to "the most deliberate con artist or the most gullible woman ever." I think that question misses the whole reason she's the most fascinating person onscreen this year. Theranos started as a real idea, and a great one. A 19-year-old Stanford dropout wanted that finger-prick machine to exist, and so did the rest of us. Even John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who took her down, told CNN he didn't think she started out planning a long con. But the machine never showed up. By then she was pot committed, so the lies came, and it took fifteen years and a jury to call the bluff. She kept people believing long after the results gave them every reason to stop. She's beautiful, but that doesn't explain the pull. She speaks the language of whatever room she's in so smoothly, and answers with so little hesitation. The men listening walk away feeling sharper and more important for getting it. She runs the room by letting men think they're driving. Tyler Shultz, the grandson who blew the whistle, said "she made you feel so important." In a deposition he said she was "really good at telling you what you need to hear to keep going." His own grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, sat on her board and took her word over the kid's warnings. Henry Kissinger told The New Yorker she ran things "by intellectual dominance." Then he wrote her TIME 100 tribute praising her "great charm" and admitted "others will judge the technical aspects." Translation: he never checked her claims and didn't care to. James Mattis, the four-star Marine general known as "Mad Dog," testified under oath, "I had no other source of information on it." The Safeway CEO testified that "whenever she was talking, she owned the room," and compared her to presidents he'd met. Carreyrou wrote in Bad Blood that her stare made you feel "like the center of the world. It was almost hypnotic." She's a real-life Jean Grey. She mindfucked these guys. She mindfucked me. I was rooting for her the whole documentary already knowing the truth. Fielder walked in already knowing all of it as well, and you can watch it happen to him too. He told the crowd at the New York Film Festival Q&A, "She seemed so genuine at times." At another screening he said, "I still am not sure to this day what I experienced." Mick LaSalle wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Clearly, she climbed into his head." It gets so obvious that by the time he's reconstructing the prison visit, Amanda Seyfried, the actress he hired to play Holmes, stops and tells him to his face, "You care about her." He knew everything about this woman going in, and it still didn't save him. That's what makes this documentary so layered, and why it belongs in the Best Picture conversation. Fielder is the guy who gets people to expose themselves with that dry humor, and now the film is exposing him too, with Seyfried questioning his love for her. I truly believe Fielder loves her. Holmes and Billy went to A24 together, but watch who actually runs that house. My mom, rest her soul, had that same power, in a much more sincere and honorable way. My dad felt like THE MAN and thought he made the decisions. In reality, my mom pretty much ran things. I've never seen anything like Holmes, though. I walked in expecting her intensity to be funny, with the baritone and that crazy-eyed stare that never blinks. The theater was laughing, but it sounded nervous to me, like people who didn't know what to think of her. At one point Billy asks A24 for a profit share after she leaves the room to tend to the kids. That's an extremely controversial move for any documentary, and the film leaves open whether she knew. I came away convinced she knew. Nobody in that house makes a move that size without her, and I read that exit as coordinated to keep her out of the discussion. It was probably her idea. Billy the villain? My theater groaned when Charlie Kirk came up at the dinner where Billy says he hopes Kirk's "voice will carry far." That same audience thought they had seen through Holmes, and then they let their dislike of Billy's politics decide who the villain was. Being a Charlie Kirk supporter doesn't make him a villain. She built the company, and the fraud, years before he showed up, and all he's done since is stand by his woman. Fielder even asks him on camera whether he ever worried he was being scammed. Billy admits it crossed his mind, then asks what she could possibly get from him, and Fielder has to bring up his family's money. Billy got the warning too, and he's STILL all in.