Does Elizabeth Holmes’s Fiancé Want to Be Elizabeth Holmes?

Haemanthus is a peculiar name for a peculiar flower. One of its southern African species, commonly known as the blood lily, blooms in a dense shock of scarlet that erupts from a single stalk, like an open wound trying to look beautiful. The name comes from the Greek words haima, blood, and anthos, flower.

As of 2024, it’s also the name of a diagnostics startup founded by Billy Evans, a hotel heir, father of two, and the romantic partner of Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes is currently serving an 11-year federal prison sentence for defrauding investors in Theranos, the blood-testing company she promised would revolutionize medicine. While Holmes sits in a facility in Bryan, Texas, Evans has been building his own venture. His company says it’s developing light-based technology to analyze blood, saliva, and urine. According to NPR, Holmes has been advising him from her cell, though Haemanthus has publicly denied any formal involvement.

Nathan Fielder, the comedian behind The Rehearsal, and Lance Oppenheim, the filmmaker behind Primetime, try to make sense of all this in their new documentary You Can See Everything, which opened in theaters October 16. The three-hour A24 film is the latest installment in the Elizabeth Holmes Extended Universe, a franchise that already includes a bestselling book, an HBO documentary, and a Hulu series. But this film is only nominally about the disgraced tech founder. Its real subject, it turns out, is the man whose devotion to her has begun to look a lot like an ambition of his own.

At first, it’s largely Holmes’s show. In fact, the documentary was her idea. She approached A24 about filming her life, and Oppenheim, who heard about the proposal, brought Fielder on board. Thirty-four days before reporting to a federal prison in Texas, she invites their crew into the beachside rental she shares with Evans and their two young children. She wants, she says, to show the public who she really is, that she’s “being real.” Fielder and Oppenheim frame Holmes in long close-ups—rocking her baby in the final days, her parents arriving to say goodbye, and Evans consoling her through it all. For the first half, you’re essentially watching a family trying to hold it together, even if this particular family makes it an uncanny thing to watch. But then, about 90 minutes in, Holmes walks into prison, and the film you thought you were watching is over. The portrait of a woman becomes a study of the man she left behind, and what he does with her absence.

Evans is fiercely devoted to her on the surface. After all, he was a fixture in her nearly four-month trial, moved to Texas to be near her facility, and now raises their two children alone. He tells Fielder he fell in love with her during their very first conversation. For a while, you might even file him under “wife guy,” the man whose identity is organized entirely around his partner. The internet has a whole taxonomy for this species. Its usual scandal, when it comes, is hypocrisy: He performs devotion, then cheats. But as the film goes on, Evans’s loyalty begins to mutate into something altogether stranger.

It starts with the little things. While Holmes whisks eggs and answers Fielder’s questions, Evans takes the bowl out of her hands and finishes the job himself. He describes her—to her face—as “weird,” someone who doesn’t process things the way other people do, and offers this as part of the reason he loves her. When Fielder questions Holmes’s father about her past, Evans steps in and shuts down the conversation.

Eventually, Evans goes beyond playing the devoted fiancé and, in her absence, begins performing her. He takes over her social media, holds power of attorney over her public image, and—most bizarrely—controls an AI model trained on her image and voice. When Fielder asks about his authority over her likeness, he says, “I can literally do anything.” He berates Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in Hulu's The Dropout, when she visits the house. At one point, he tells the camera he has “vengeance in my heart.” The whole thing begins to feel like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: a man so consumed by his idea of a woman that he begins reconstructing her, right down to the voice.

Psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske might recognize the pattern. Their theory of “benevolent sexism” describes how admiration and protectiveness toward a woman can function, often invisibly, as authority over her. It doesn’t really require malice, just a man who sincerely believes that he’s helping. Take the French novelist Colette, who published her first books under her first husband's pen name, Willy. He recognized her talent, promoted it, monetized it, and signed it as his. The arrangement made perfect sense in their world: a man channeling a woman’s gifts through his authority. In a way, he was her greatest champion, but he also made rather good business out of being her. What Evans is doing recalls a similar gesture stripped of its period costume. Holmes’s gift, if you can call it that, was the ability to make people believe in a technology that didn’t work.

We have spent a decade turning Holmes into a cultural obsession: the turtleneck, the fake baritone, the girlboss rise, and the fraud conviction. She’s been dramatized, dissected, memed. But the men beside her tend to become supporting characters in her mythology. First, it was Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former romantic and business partner, who served as Theranos’s COO and is now serving a nearly 13-year federal sentence. Now Evans—who arrived after the fall, watched her conviction, and told Fielder on camera that he knew she might be scamming him when they met—is building a venture of his own from the wreckage. He even negotiated a share of this very documentary’s profits with A24 while Holmes was out of the room, a deal he later relinquished. One of the film’s most revealing turns is how it brings the man at the edge of Holmes’s story into the center of its own.

None of this exonerates Holmes. She built the lie, and a jury said so. But You Can See Everything is after something more unsettling than another verdict on her. The film watches Evans the way Evans watches Holmes, and lets the portrait accumulate. By the end, you’re left with the queasy recognition that male ambition can operate most freely when it’s dressed as belief in a woman. That a man’s faith in his partner can function as a vehicle for his own reinvention, and that even a woman who catastrophically abused her own power can become raw material for someone else’s.

Haemanthus insists that it is not Theranos 2.0. They say it’s something new: a different technology, different approach, and different leadership. Its CEO just happens to be the partner of the most famous blood-testing fraudster in history, and its name just happens to be Greek for blood flower.

The blood lily blooms before its leaves appear. The stalk comes first, bare. Then the flower, with no foliage around it, nothing to obscure the view. You can see everything, and still not know what you’re looking at.