Helen Archer | On 24, Jan 2023

There can’t be many people who are unaware of Elizabeth Holmes – even before the trial which found her guilty of defrauding investors, and the 11-year prison sentence handed down to her in 2021. The case of Theranos, her Silicon Valley-based blood-testing company, has been covered in articles, books, podcasts, documentaries and dramas – Holmes was the original 21st-century grifter story, leading the charge in the public’s interest in multi-million dollar scammers. This 2019 documentary by Alex Gibney, taken from the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-Up by John Carreyou – who first broke the Theranos story in a 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation – condenses the narrative into a two-hour running time, arguably to its detriment.

Those with interest in the story of Theranos will by now presumably have seen the 8-episode dramatisation The Dropout (based on the podcast The Dropout), in which Amanda Seyfried gives an astounding, Emmy-winning performance as the controlled, unblinking Holmes. Many of those who pop up as characters there are interviewed in their real-life capacity here. It’s a lesson in how circularly self-referential the various mediums are in telling the same story, slightly differently, so that each one is a smorgasbord of easter eggs, an ouroboros eating its own content. Even within this film, we see acclaimed true crime documentary maker Errol Morris filming a promotional video for Theranos, and interviewing Holmes in the footage which opens the documentary. “Can you tell me a secret?” Morris asks Holmes from behind the camera. Wearing her usual black turtleneck, in front of a brilliant white background, with a ring light shining in her blank eyes, Holmes, previously eloquent, is momentarily lost for words. “I don’t have many secrets,” she answers. That, of course, was a lie.

We see here that Holmes lied to everyone, about everything, with devastating consequences. The documentary takes a chronological approach to Theranos itself, starting from the point they take offices in Palo Alto’s Stanford Research Park, and the kind of toxic atmosphere it bred. Interviewing ex-employees, Gibney also uses older telephone and filmed interviews with some of the rich, influential investors in Theranos – including family friend Tim Draper, General James Mattis, Henry Kissinger, and former Secretary of State George Schultz, whose grandson Tyler interned at the company, before he turned whistleblower – as well as Holmes’s first doubter, Stanford Professor Dr Phyllis Gardner. Played by Laurie Gardner in the Disney drama, she wryly describes Holmes’ investors as “powerful older men who seemed to succumb to a certain charm”. Gibney builds a picture of Holmes, firstly as she wanted to see herself – there are clips here of her hero Thomas Edison’s first motion pictures, a man whose fake-it-till-you-make-it ethos Holmes adopted, and whose name she gave to her doomed machine – and, ultimately, in her downfall, as the world saw her.

This documentary – as opposed to the dramatisation – gives the suicide of Theranos employee, Cambridge-educated biochemist Ian Gibbons, fairly short shrift. Nor does it dwell too deeply on the long-term relationship between Holmes and her right-hand-man Sunny Balwani. What it focuses on instead is the toxic work environment and truly appalling blood testing machinery to which the term “unfit for use” doesn’t do justice. Recreations of spilled blood vials, of compromised needles that dart towards lab technicians’ hands, and parts of the Edison falling off as it runs, are the order of the day. While one can hardly feel churlish about this – there is much to cram into that two-hour running time – the avoidance of the human angle does somewhat lessen the film’s impact.

Holmes has never faced her truth publicly. The film suggests that she never will – her glassy-eyed insistence that she is working towards a better world never falters. Even as the media picks up the story, and as it emerges that over $600m investment money was lost, she refused to back down on her assertion that the Edison – given time, and more money – would work. The rigid, unbending mind of Elizabeth Holmes is the heart of the documentary – but the fact she will never let anyone see any cracks in her psyche is, too, its undoing. Holmes remains an unknown, perhaps unknowable, quantity, despite the many iterations of her story.

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