It’s fitting that You Can See Everything, the new documentary directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, stirs up so many reactions, ideas, and theories that I have an intense desire to share while simultaneously feeling certain that the right thing to do is to keep all that intellectual data fully hidden. Ever since this film made its debut with a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival, the consistent directive was to go into an initial viewing of it with as little foreknowledge as possible. Now that I’ve spent nearly three hours in thrall to its ingenuity, I agree with that advice. The surprises that arise from the audacious filmmaking choices and jolting revelations of the people onscreen are one thing. Much as there’s value in preserving the shock of those moments, I think that holding back thoughts about its themes, storytelling turns, and embedded conjecture is just as valuable. Everyone deserves to experience the terrain of this movie the barest amount of outside influence.

Given the above, what can I even write here? What should I write? I think there are some basic statements that are fair game. It’s surely fine to note that the film is a documentary that follows Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous founder of Theranos, in the weeks before she begins serving a federal prison sentence for defrauding investors and that the filmmakers essentially embed with her and her current romantic partner, Billy Evans, in a California beachside home they rent. Fielder is on camera with the couple and continuously probes to get at some basic facts about Holmes’s history which in turn leads to him relentlessly trying to understand her, to push past whatever barriers she has up — due to legal reticence, an offbeat way of thinking, or nuclear-grade disassociation — to get at the core of her being. In the process, the film becomes a consideration of the guises that all people don.

Fielder specializes in artifice, and You Can See Everything takes every conceivable angle to examine how falsehood and performance and authenticity layer on top of one another. Sometimes it seems Fielder and Oppenheim are arguing that such confections of conflicting perceptions are a reasonable path to finding a deeper, elusive inner meaning, and sometimes the apparent conclusion is that such questing is futile no matter what. The magic-act brilliance of the film is that the inability to land on definitive answers to the multitude of questions it poses is a strength rather than a shortcoming. As expertly as the film is assembled in its cinematic mechanics — the cinematography, editing, and score are all impeccable — the directors’ main achievement is in turning the documentary form inside out to expose its inherent fallibility even as the value of its truth telling is celebrated. It’s impossible to see everything. Even if it were possible, that expansive view doesn’t guarantee seeing all.