The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley is a fairly pedestrian documentary that is carried by how enthralling its subject matter is.  It takes the smorgasbord approach to documentary film making: it wants to be a systemic failure doc like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a crime exposé like Ikarus, and a character study on greed like The Queen of Versailles, but in that lack of focus it fails at being truly great at any of them.

The movie feels the strongest when it is dealing with the Theranos founder herself, Elizabeth Holmes, or how her and her partner ‘Sunny’ took the administrative elements of the company and molded them into something that resembles a cult.  The most fascinating thing the piece reveals is Holmes’ almost supernatural ability to make people trust her despite all evidence to the contrary. In one particularly chilling segment, a former employee describes how he walked out of the research department convinced the company was a sinking ship, had a half hour meeting with Holmes, and left her office suddenly believing again that Theranos was changing the future.

The movie also offers some interesting perspective on how the innovation models that have been so successful in Silicon Valley up to this point are weak, or even dangerous, when applied to fields like medicine.  The mantra of fail faster is great for rapid design and development of new consumer tech or software, but the movie questions whether such techniques are still ideal when people’s lives are at stake.

At times it takes this perspective on Silicon Valley a little too far.  The film keeps trying to make a broader point about society or politics while ignoring the facts of the test case as the documentary itself has presented them.  This is a problem I feel it shares with the otherwise excellent Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which isn’t a huge surprise since they are from the same director.  In Enron it is the boogeyman of deregulation and in The Inventor it is startup culture and Silicon Valley.  Both films tell the story of companies committing fraud.  Fraud is a crime of deception, so tacitly asking through the narrative of the film for more regulation (Enron) or more due diligence (The Inventor) reads false since all it is asking for is to add one more lie to the stack of lies the liars profiled have already proven themselves willing to make.  On the other hand, the downstream consequences of the fraud, especially the multi-layer coverups and stop gaps presented in The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley, are what make the tales fascinating, and at times horrifying, so that should be the focus of the movie.  Perhaps most damning about this movie is that, where Enron has a very particular political point it is trying to drive home with its asides, despite my gripes with how it is presented, The Inventor feels like it is doing it just to pad out the length of the feature.

After some days for reflection, I had the realization that this movie was probably not made like a normal documentary, but rather was built in the edit mostly from footage shot by legendary documentarian Errol Morris, who had been hired by Theranos to shoot corporate films, with expert interviews and talking heads to fill in the narrative.  It would explain how they got so much insider footage from before the scandal broke despite Theranos’ abject paranoia and obsessive secrecy. It would also explain why The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley feels like the production team got enough material for 60% of two or three really excellent documentaries and the only way they could save the project was to graft them all together.  While I think this is a bold artistic choice, repurposing Theranos’ own corporate promotional materials to tell the story of their downfall, it does create a noticeable lack of focus. That being said, once the exposé really gets moving, it is easy to ignore those structural faults as the roller coaster of Holmes, “Sunny” Balwani, and Theranos gets wilder and wilder.

Would Recommend: If you are captivated by stories of greed, ambition, and the sudden downfall of powerful people as their houses of cards tumble.

Would Not Recommend: If long form TV documentaries aren’t usually enough to grab your attention.