The hit Elizabeth Holmes documentary led to increased interest in the award-winning narrative series on Hulu as well as Bad Blood, a 2018 book on the scandal

• ‘Stranger than stranger-than-fiction’: how Lance Oppenheim made the year’s two buzziest films

• ‘You can’t make this stuff up’: why we remain fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes

Interest in Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos fraud scandal has surged amid buzz for You Can See Everything, the record-breaking documentary on the disgraced former CEO.

Viewership for The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, surged by 186% in September compared with the month prior, according to Variety, after the announcement on 6 September of the previously secret film’s first teaser.

Nathan Fielder’s secretive Elizabeth Holmes documentary has become a sold-out smash hit and might make Oscars history

Spoilers ahead

If there is one moment that sums up You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary on Elizabeth Holmes that until this weekend was shrouded in spoiler-averse secrecy, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the one everyone already knows: co-director Nathan Fielder, the droll comedian known for deadpanning subjects into submission, sitting eye to eye with Holmes, the unblinking fabulist of Theranos infamy. In tight zoom, saturation turned up – Fielder’s arched brows and Holmes’s oceanic blue eyes as stark as two magnetic poles – he asks her: “Are you being real right now?”

That question hangs over much of the colossal three-hour movie, particularly a claustrophobic first half that has made headlines since the film’s existence was announced in September. That first half – essentially, the only part of the movie anyone respecting spoiler guidelines and/or the theatrical experience could talk about – takes place entirely in 2023, when Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim, along with a small crew, embedded with Holmes, her husband, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the run-up to her prison sentence for fraud. We watch as Fielder, over a few surreal weeks in a beachfront rental, attempts to puncture Holmes’s indomitable facade of faultlessness. It’s not exactly comedic, this chess game between three norms-ignoring people, but it can be quite funny: TV’s grand illusionist, an absurdist auteur who will go as far as actually obtaining a 737 pilot’s license for the bit, stymied by a world-class fabricator, with her poorly dissembling husband on the side. This section resembles, in feel, the pull of an internet wormhole: the closer you zoom in on a subject, without outside context, the more sense devolves. Was Holmes “being real”, for instance, when she told Fielder, with seemingly complete sincerity, that she has never told a lie in her life? Or when she continued to insist, despite plain reality, that Theranos devices could perform 1,000 diagnostic tests?

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s headspinning documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is an unprecedented critical success – even with a three-hour runtime

Name: The best reviewed film in history.

Age: Not even out yet, except in the US and Canada.