t's likely that most audiences going into the surprise documentary smash You Can See Everything are familiar with either its nominal subject (and literal poster gal with an intense stare) Elizabeth Holmes, the tech founder serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors; or the film's on-camera co-director Nathan Fielder. Holmes, as the movie points out, was all over the media as her company Theranos was hyped to the moon and then spectacularly imploded; she was also played by Amanda Seyfried in the well-regarded Hulu miniseries The Dropout. Fielder, meanwhile, may not have graced as many magazine covers, but is similarly familiar to prestige-TV acolytes from his comedy-reality series Nathan for You and its successor, the more reality-bending series The Rehearsal. A third figure not included in the film's ad campaign becomes a key part of the film in the second half, and will also be familiar to many viewers.

This should leave Billy Evans as the odd man out. Evans, Elizabeth Holmes's partner (she has said they're not legally married, though they did get engaged in 2018, have two children and seem to treat each other as spouses), is a not-particularly-famous guy whose screen time competes with the other three well-known faces in what is essentially a four-character drama. But while Evans isn't boxed out in terms of screen time or memorability, he does remain the odd man out in the sense that in all the discussion You Can See Everything has prompted about manipulation, shifting sympathies and who can or cannot be trusted, everyone seems to agree on one crucial point: Billy Evans sucks.

Well, everyone except Holmes, who never indicates so much as a moment of doubt or hesitation toward her common-law husband, at least so far as Fielder or co-director Lance Oppenheim show us. But the movie does show Fielder appearing baffled by Holmes – her absurd claims to have never lied in her adult life; her tautological and nonsensical explanation of how her blood-testing device does actually work (which basically amounts to "if everything about it worked, it would work"); her inability to understand Abbott and Costello's most famous comedy routine – to the point of having trouble discerning whether she's consciously scamming him or just, let's say, reality-divergent. By comparison, Evans comes across as more of a slightly puzzling but recognizable nuisance.

When he calls a meeting to demand a percentage of the film's profits – the kind of arrangement that might be typically reserved for a promotional piece commissioned by a musician, not a nonfiction film extensively interviewing a notorious subject – Fielder and Oppenheim zero in on the question of whether Holmes knew about this request and what became of it. But Evans is the one who violates documentary norms by asking for profit participation (and getting it, at least temporarily). Earlier on, he demands privacy when he grows visibly uncomfortable with questions asked of Holmes while also appearing fully, frontally nude in the film. In a small but underlined moment, he casually relieves Holmes of egg-scrambling duty because he believes she's not stirring vigorously enough.

And those are just some of his antics before the film's two year time-jump, after which Evans seems to exert even more control over his partner. Given Holmes's reputation as a Silicon Valley scam artist, it would make sense enough to categorize Evans as a real-life version of Hollywood's favorite go-to villain: the evil tech bro. The film even refers to Holmes's turn in that particular hot seat as the subject of The Dropout, which is not a story of heroes and villains, exactly, but certainly exists adjacent to narratives about tech-forward monsters.

Evans has plenty of grimly hilarious signifiers, before and after his partner's incarceration. Beforehand, he can be seen listening to podcasts at double speed like a true #content consumer/wannabe timemaxxer. Afterward, he shows repeated signs (uncommented upon by Oppenheim or Fielder) of posturing but increasingly intense post-"woke" radicalization: he spends time at a shooting range, claims to carry a gun everywhere, volunteers that he's a fan of Charlie Kirk and brags about his own supposed vindictiveness. He uses his sketchy control of Holmes's social media to engage in petty clapbacks that seem entirely out of character for her; he uses his sketchy control of her AI likeness to side-boast about how much healthier she looks as a prisoner than she did immediately postpartum.

With paranoia, delusions of grandeur, lofty-sounding projects that don't amount to anything and a seeming possessiveness of the woman in his life, Evans checks plenty of tech-bro boxes – only without even a modicum of demonstrated tech expertise, seemingly not even in his fevered imaginings. Yes, Elon Musk propped himself up as a genius on the basis of other people's companies and his vast fortune, Mark Zuckerberg is a dead-eyed egomaniac whose famous invention is a Friendster clone that bought up a bunch of other already-successful websites and Sam Altman's career is littered with failures that in no way qualify him to order us all to treat AI as the future. But even if you see these guys as scammers nearly on par with Holmes, they have the distinction of having successfully made money and, in the case of Musk and Zuckerberg, placing some of their might behind products that people do actually use (in some cases, whether they really want to or not). One reason they're villainized in fictionalized true stories like those powering The Social Reckoning (with Jeremy Strong as Zuck) or the upcoming Artificial (with Andrew Garfield as Altman and Ike Barinholtz as Musk) is that they have actually accrued power in the first place. There are stakes to their existence.

Evans has no such claims to fame or even big-canvas notoriety that could inspire something like the four-hour Musk documentary by Alex Gibney, released concurrently with You Can See Everything. It seems notable, too, that the similarly lengthy You Can See Everything has seemingly stolen focus from the more traditionally rigorous piece on Musk, a far more influential individual compared to either Holmes or Evans. Holmes was certainly a destructive force for the cancer patients whose hopes she raised, and Evans comes across like a restless creep, but it feels telling, and a little discomfiting, that the gossipy nervous laughter provoked by You Can See Everything is proving a vastly more headline-grabbing draw than a movie laying out the case against a maniacal on-again, off-again trillionaire who has done genuine damage to the world, and is poised to do plenty more. Does someone need to be as petty, strange and blatantly unsuccessful as Evans to be truly finished off in public?

Then again, Evans does make a compelling villain for precisely that restless lack of achievement. He will never be as influential as someone like Musk or Zuckerberg, but apparently aspires to that kind of overlord-level bravado (why else would you use your wife's social media to pick fights?). He's a fake-it-til-you-make-it-and-then-keeping-faking-it type, more akin to erstwhile reality star turned pretend mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt or any number of filibustering podcasters. Instead of Facebook or Tesla or a portfolio of Donald Trump-style scams, he can simply puppeteer the damaged brand that is Elizabeth Holmes – near-literally, when he shows off his AI version. Holmes is clearly manipulative (and based on available information about Theranos, an unambiguous liar), yet Fielder does locate, or maybe even manufacture, some kind of humanity through her inscrutability. There's something haunting about her, sometimes in spite of herself. Evans is the odd man out in You Can See Everything because he seems to lack that kind of turmoil. He's hustle-and-grind culture in its final dehumanizing form. The world is just something for him to absorb and scan for advantages at 2x speed.