The Oscars have found a new possible contender, and it’s the strangest documentary we’re going to see in our lives

A24 unexpectedly premiered its new film last Sunday at the Telluride Film Festival: You Can See Everything, by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. This is a documentary that follows Elizabeth Holmes thirty-four days before she goes to prison in an sprawling 174-minute non-fiction epic that has left attendees at the screening slack-jawed. They say we may well be looking at this year’s most surprising Oscar contender.

A multi-billion-dollar scam

Elizabeth Holmes is a highly controversial figure who has already had several documentaries. An entrepreneur and founder of the health tech company Theranos, she claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing a technique that required only a minimal amount of blood to perform the tests. All of this led to a fraud in which she swindled more than 9 billion dollars and for which she would be sentenced to more than 10 years in prison after failing to secure a presidential pardon from current president Donald Trump.

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Meanwhile, Nathan Fielder is a very distinctive figure in today’s audiovisual landscape. Known for the series Nathan for You, where he played a version of himself trying to help struggling businesses with tremendously elaborate and surreal marketing campaigns, and The Rehearsal, where he played a fictionalized version of himself with social anxiety who helped people rehearse uncomfortable or difficult real-life situations before they happened, his comedy and documentary style constantly blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. Something that seems to happen with equal intensity in You Can See Everything.

With a release planned for October, A24 hopes the film will make it to this year’s Oscars. And it has the potential, given Fielder’s track record and the way he has historically walked the fine line between humor and existential philosophy. We’ll find out when this, without a doubt, peculiar experiment is released.