Sometimes a movie lands at exactly the right moment. There are many comparison points for You Can See Everything (though, really, there is nothing else quite like it), but to me the movie it most immediately calls to mind is The Matrix—which came along and torched our brains at a moment of immense technological change.
Like that movie, You Can See Everything scratches at our current reality to reveal some perplexing questions. Chief among them: Do real people actually exist anymore? Or have we become so consumed with the idea of who we are and who we present ourselves to be—and how those images can be distorted and manipulated—that we’ve lost the ability to parse what is and isn’t actually real.
That’s just one of the ideas that’s been bouncing around my head since seeing You Can See Everything, a documentary (?) that unfolds as a mystery where you wait to uncover the truth but instead it just keeps unraveling and unraveling (reminding me of this quote from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure). Is this a psychological portrait of obsessive, attention-hungry people? A meditation on an age without real communication or empathy? Or just clever filmmakers creating something out of nothing?
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what to make of anything that happens in the enthralling three-hour runtime of You Can See Everything or any of the faces that appear on screen. Is it all just artifice (both the people and the documenting)? I have no idea. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.