The documentary about Theranos’s fallen founder Elizabeth Holmes is riveting.
⭐⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 3.5 out of 4.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about fallen tech star Elizabeth Holmes is a riveting head trip and wild genre-bender that intoxicatingly combines classic journalism with inventive narrative departures. This eely shape-shifter burrows into you and won’t let go.
The making of the film is as much the story as its subject, who — at the time Fielder and Oppenheim catch up with her — is 34 days from beginning an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. Theranos, her blood-testing start-up that promised to revolutionize health care and help detect cancer early, could only perform a small number of the 240-plus analytical tests it claimed. Holmes founded the company at 19. She and her Theranos partner and lover, Sunny Balwani, were exposed in a 2015 Wall Street Journal investigative piece and later tried on felony charges for fraud and fiscal deceit, sentenced in 2022 (Balwani got 12 years), and ordered to pay more than $450 million in restitution.
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