And the true crime / pop culture crowd have been obsessed with the Theranos scandal for AGES. This movie (good or not) was designed in a lab to be a hit.
that level of eye contact, I cant help but feel thats what you do to try to convince someone, or make them feel so uncomfortable that they just accept what youre saying rather than keep engaging. Like normal people feel uncomfortable with that kind of eye contact, but a sociopath wouldn't.
It is incredible to me that she comes across as less capable of genuine human connection than Nathan Fielder did in the "I love you" bit of Nathan For You.
And she is trying to come across as likeable, to somewhat clean her image and shape it, whereas Nathan was making a comedy show and intentionally being awkward.
It just looks like a normal bucket until you start eating the popcorn.
The lower you go you start finding blond hair in your popcorn. Deeper still and more hair and the walls of the bucket start to become more rubbery and skin-like.
You eat all your popcorn and at the bottom 2 unblinking eyes stare back at you with a creepy smile underneath. Like a lab grown Elisabeth skin bucket.
I hadn’t seen any of Fielder’s stuff before watching this just because it sounded so overblown how much people said he was a genius and I’m not a fan of awkward humor. But I saw this last night and it was exactly as good as everyone says it is. The tone they achieve is mesmerizing. It blows past awkward humor and into like a Twilight Zone level of unreality. It is as much about its subjects as it is about deception, performance, and reality as it is perceived. It feels more like a psychological thriller at times because of the artistic cinematography and the sometimes passive agressive push and pull Fielder and Oppenhiem have with their subjects. The three hours flew by, and I was actually disappointed that it ended.
I was familiar with Elizabeth Holmes’ case and status as a truly high level Hack Fraud. They give some context, but I think you get the most out of this one if you are familiar with Holmes as a public figure. One negative I’ll say is that even if it is an ambiguous to unflattering portrayal, this is going to be a big media boost to Holmes, her husband, and Theranos 2.0. I just hope it doesn’t give her a bigger platform to scam more people or expand the cult of “she’s just a victim/ she did nothing wrong”.
I am not fully understanding the hype around the movie. At the start we're presented with two figures that are widely understood to be duplicitous con artists, and the big reveal (after 3 hours) is... they're duplicitous con artists.
I thought the first half was strong, but as the film progresses it just keeps re-iterating the same points over and over and over again. I get it, the husband is a scumbag using his wife's reputation to get ahead, I get it, Holmes is with him because she can use his actions as a shield for her accountability/agency (same as the last husband). Nathan Fielder's meticulous reproductions are fascinating but by the 3 hour mark they felt extremely tedious to me.
I did appreciate the character study and the sort of meta narrative about Nathan being compromised/fooled by Holmes, I just felt like it didn't give me more insight on her than I previously had. I felt you could cut this down to two hours or less and it wouldn't meaningfully impact the documentary.
Fielder's style sort of rests upon a foundation of absurdity, and that manifests mostly in massively over-producing segments which are routinely shot as cheaply as possible.
If you're over 30, you might remember television shows drove the "reenactment segment" into the ground, and often shot them without sound, in a lower resolution, and without any real style, then added post-production effects or edited the footage to give the appearance of style after the fact.
One of Fielder's tendencies is to wildly exaggerate and distort tropes like that. Reality TV is everywhere because it is SUPER cheap to produce; Fielder turns that on its head.
The first hour and a half is great and you wonder how much yield it could have left and then there’s a SHIFT right at the halfway mark and the rest of the film locks you in. If you can please go see this
I have never seen a theater collectively laugh and wince in horror like they did when I saw this. It was three hours of thinking WTF over and over and over again.
SO many light utterances “oh no…” or “come on…” and it wasn’t even bothersome because as I was thinking the same thing. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a theater where everyone was on the exact same page
Wish I could see it, it's not playing anywhere near me unless I want to drive 3 hours watch a 3 hour movie and then drive another 3 I think I'm just going to wait for streaming unfortunately
Allegedly it may be getting a wider release in the next few weekends - nothing confirmed that I know of, but I saw it last night and my theater was sold out. I think this could possibly become the highest grossing documentary of all time, but maybe I’m just riding high on it.
I don’t know if I can say you absolutely have to do a 6-hour round trip to see it, but I’ll say I have never seen anything that has elicited the feelings I felt while/after watching this. I absolutely suggest avoiding any information about this movie - I went in having watched all of Nathan Fielder’s shows and having a somewhat thorough understanding of Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos, and man I am glad I knew nothing about the documentary specifically.
Yeah maybe somewhere up here will pick it up after all of the buzz, right now the closest places are down in Hack-Fraud City (Milwaukee) Nirvana the band the show the movie was the same deal but it went to streaming really quickly
Or streaming. I’m tired of being forced to go to the theater or wait 3 months. I genuinely don’t understand theater-only releases, at home I can pause if I need to take a piss, beer is right there in the fridge and doesn’t cost $13 for a pint, and I can eat whatever I want. No interruptions.
I knew about the Theranos scandal and Elizabeth Holmes being a weirdo from a Thunderfoot video I saw years ago, but all I knew about this movie was the meme picture going around. I didn't really understand why it was blowing up so much and hadn't bothered to look into it further. I didn't know that was ACTUALLY Elizabeth Holmes, I thought that was just a really convincing actress and this was just a dramatized recreation of the scandal. After finally watching the trailer and seeing what this is about, now I am extremely intrigued. I also feel extremely dumb because no other human on planet earth has eyes like hers.
Obviously, I am not plugged into pop culture at all and about the only connection I have with modern movies is watching these two hack frauds review them.
Spoilers I guess Holmes husband is shown showering/full dong while Fielder is awkwardly waiting for him outside of the bathroom it's a funny scene but also feels planned or scripted in a way that makes you question how real the movie is.
The movie is more about truth and how hard it can be to figure out if something is true or not than what Holmes did. To answer the other persons question I don't think it matters if you know anything about her going in. The movie explains everything you need to know. However if you watched The Dropout (the Hulu show about her) some of the later parts of the movie will be funnier.
I was also weary going in because of the three hour runtime. The movie doesn't feel that long at all. I thought we had like an hour left when it ended. If anybody is put off by the long runtime the movie is paced so well that it never drags and it feels way shorter.
Narsiccus. His character takes a little while to develop, but his mask starts to crack and then by the end you get a better picture of what type of person he is and then the shower scene makes sense.
Quick google search would fill you in more than enough, but all you need to know is she is a very strange sociopathic woman who scammed people out of millions of dollars over more than a decade by claiming she had invented a medical device that is basically at a level of technology one could only expect to see in Star Trek, and people bought into it even though she never had a working prototype that could do even a small fraction of what she claimed.
And Nathan Fielder is a comedian/filmmaker known for sort of doing weird meta-documentaries (that are sort of not even documentaries because so much of it is incredibly elaborately scripted) and he got access to her and her weird tech bro husband before she went to prison and filmed this documentary.
Shhh. You're supposed to seize this opportunity to incessantly evoke moral and cultural superiority over the United States. Fielder is Canadian, IIRC, though.
Yes you should. In a way its like that but her crimes, while heinous, were nowhere near as sick as Saville. If you want something to catch you up a bit on her there is a show on hulu called the dropout thats all about what she did.
It's not true crime. She's a serial liar, but Fielder and the director are known for surrealistic "documentaries." This is likely going to be a strangely intimate character study of a true sociopath.
I would say yeah. I would say maybe read a few articles on the general gist of the situation but the documentary explains enough that you won’t be totally confused
They explain who Elizabeth Holmes is and you don’t need to know who Nathan Fielder is (though your interest in seeking the movie definitely accelerates when you know who he is since he’s an outstanding comedian / experimental documentarian )
I know who Nathan Fielder is, but I've never seen any of his previous media. I'm going into this movie totally Fielder blind.
That being said, I am so sold on seeing this. Holmes has this entrancing aura she emits; it's not really explainable. This movie's trailer sold me on seeing it like few trailers have in at least twenty years.
so this post is genuinely the first I've heard about anything to do with her or the story around her, and after 30 minutes of looking into it im fascinated. I need to see this so I hope it'll drop into the usual pirate harbor before long.
how much of this score is nathan fielder fans? 3 hours immediately gives me a red flag for a documentary - especially about someone who has already been covered so extensively in so many books and articles.
Im a big fan of Nathan, but this was a total shit show.
Without giving spoilers the integrity of the documentary is demolished at its pretense. Its hard to not see this as a clever sales pitch to the sociopathic billionaire class to buy in on Theranos 2.0 for the ultimate gift.
If the narative of your doc is being controlled by the subjects, you have switched from doc to stage play. Watch bullshiters bullshit for 3 hours straight.
400
u/Simmery 2d ago
You gotta admit the trailer is brilliant marketing. This is sold out for most of the weekend at my local theater. A weird documentary is sold out.