Elizabeth Holmes, the famously eccentric billionaire now serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, fascinates less for her crimes than for the mystery surrounding her perception of them. Scams at health companies are a dime a dozen, and Theranos — the blood-testing startup that Holmes, a Stanford dropout, founded in 2003 — stands out largely because its fraud touched many of the rich and powerful. Yet Holmes is notable for another reason as well: she doggedly insists she is wrongly accused.

"You Can See Everything," a documentary co-directed by and starring Nathan Fielder — the comedian best known for "Nathan for You" and "The Rehearsal" — who receives unfettered access to Holmes shortly before she reports to prison, does not illuminate the mystery behind her. By the end, she stands as staunchly as ever not only by her self-proclaimed innocence, but by other questionable aspects of her past — and, for that matter, her current life choices. The film is intriguing precisely because it never reveals anything about Holmes in a conventional sense. It simply shows her as she is, then gives viewers enough distance from the subject to encourage them to reach their own conclusions.

But that is not all it does. Partway through the film, Holmes begins her prison sentence, yet the story is far from over. Her husband, Billy Evans, makes a long-foreshadowed heel turn, exhibiting controlling behavior toward Holmes and prompting Fielder and actress Amanda Seyfried — who won an Emmy for playing Holmes in the miniseries "The Dropout" — to accuse Evans of exploiting her. Like its treatment of Holmes' self-honesty, "You Can See Everything" never resolves the questions surrounding the Holmes-Evans relationship. merely observes from a distance, or through Seyfried, who cleverly and uncannily reprises her role as Holmes.

The film's most important theme is that objective reality is never particularly important to the people with the most power. They occupy a world in which merely believing something to be true often seems to literally make it true. Watching Holmes display these traits in the lead-up to her prison sentence, it becomes easier to understand how she built a multibillion-dollar company, once valued at $9 billion at its peak, on a promise — that Theranos could run comprehensive blood tests with just a few drops of blood — that she never had the ability to deliver on.

Because people like Holmes continue to exert power over public life, "You Can See Everything" ends up being about far more than one particular scammer. Holmes embodies the sense of entitlement and willful delusion of a class of people capable of building mega-corporations on hype. It is visible in AI executives who continue to develop a technology they plausibly believe could destroy humanity, or at least create an uninhabitable economy. It is visible, too, in the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, which — perhaps not surprisingly — has embraced Holmes' victim narrative. As Kathryn Olivarius, a Stanford University historian writing a book on the MAHA movement, told Politico last year: "she's such a perfect martyr for this. It feels almost inevitable that this would happen. There's something in her story for everyone in this movement… You can always frame it so that you know she's somehow being victimized here."

Before reporters at The Wall Street Journal — whose investigation of Theranos began publishing in 2015 — and federal investigators exposed her, Holmes had caused massive, unnecessary suffering. Theranos falsely reported miscarriages, recommended blood thinners for a patient who did not need them, and misdiagnosed patients with deadly ailments such as prostate cancer and heart attacks. While the full scope of Theranos' harm will likely never be known, Arizona found that roughly 10 percent of its blood test results had to be corrected or voided from 2013 to 2016. Holmes also silenced dissenters and whistleblowers, and harmed businesses like Walgreens and Safeway, both of which eventually cut ties with her. Holmes and her business partner, Sunny Balwani — who was separately convicted of defrauding Theranos patients and investors — were later ordered to pay roughly $452 million in restitution jointly or separately, of which almost $398 million went to losses from 12 Theranos investors.

There were harsh real-world consequences for Holmes' delusions, and "You Can See Everything" deserves credit for never losing sight of that. Quite to the contrary, it tries almost desperately to get Holmes to accept accountability, to show sincere empathy in any meaningful way to her victims. The task is doomed to failure, though — even Fielder seems painfully aware of that — and the documentary tells the story of the entertaining way it is unable to get a scammer to see straight.