I think what makes the movie both incredibly powerful and also frustrating to people who know the Holmes story really well is that it’s a film mostly “about” the impossible ambiguity of truly getting to the bottom of another person*—and that lesson is largely true and it’s profoundly performed in the movie—but this particular movie is about a very particular person who lied so blatantly in so many ways that an alternative and more prosecutorial documentary wouldn’t have struggled much to prove who she is: a convincing liar who’s lying (convincingly at times) about having been a convincing liar. And so while Fielder’s artifice is both incredibly entertaining and often ingenious I get the critique that it’s also an unnecessary maneuver to get to the bottom of *this particular person* whose record of lying is so blatant and whose psychopathy is so richly documented in the public record. *I mean, right? That’s clearly the point? Seems important that the movie begins with the husband saying “nobody knows who she is” and ends with Amanda saying she can’t be sure who Elizabeth is or how Nathan feels about her, and the last frame is a paragraph of text about how no one—not the NYT, not Fielder, not Holmes—can be absolutely sure if Elizabeth actually told the Times that Amanda was “playing a character I created” bc nobody has a perfect record of the most important quote in the film ever actually being said. The movie is designed to build toward the conclusion that there is no definitive conclusion.