Sorry, but I'm going to do that thing everyone is doing:

Me: "Did you watch 'You Can See Everything,' the documentary about tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes?"

Perhaps you: "Not yet!"

Then I'll chew my fist before sinking into the bushes because any utterance about Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's mesmerizing, twist-filled art piece will amount to spoilers. I'll urge you to see the movie while it's in theaters, in an environment that forces you to darken your device and commit to the three-movement symphony that builds toward life's most unanswerable question:

Can we ever really know another person?

Which brings us to Florida, fertile ground for fantasy, existential dread draped in beach towels, escape hatch for cold temperatures and colder truths. Now is the right moment to revisit an early Oppenheim work set in a highly particular pocket of Florida artifice: The Villages.

This week, I fired up a rewatch of Oppenheim's first high-profile documentary, "Some Kind of Heaven," which you can rent for $4 on several platforms. Co-produced by the New York Times and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, the movie premiered in 2020 on — if you can believe it — Oppenheim's 24th birthday.

By now, most Floridians know the apocryphal lore surrounding Florida's retirement megalopolis northeast of Tampa Bay: loofahs on car antennas signaling sex invites; rampant sexually transmitted diseases; drinking and dancing in the town square; Republican politics at the fore.

Many of those myths have been debunked or contextualized, revealing the Villages as a retiree playground, yes, but one that isn't such a monolith. To gain access to some of its fascinating folks, Oppenheim moved into The Villages himself. Even at his young age, the Florida native had the intuition to go deeper, to train his lens not on blissed-out golf cart drivers but on characters who fractured the veneer of tropical Xanadu.

We meet Reggie and Anne, a married couple plagued by Reggie's drug addiction and quest for spiritual Zen. We meet Dennis, a rover who lives in his van while finding girlfriends to support him. And we meet Barbara, a lonely widow with a crush on a dude who brings margaritas to Parrot Head parties. All our subjects suffer layered, real-time woe amid a backdrop of synchronized palm trees, houses and swimmers.

The Villages management disavowed the film upon its release, saying it did not "do justice to our experience."

"Some people are very defensive, the sort of Villages maniacs who love everything about the place. I'm not sure if they've even seen it," Oppenheim told the Tampa Bay Times in 2021. "Some just abjectly hate it because it's made by an outsider. I don't see this as a negative film."

Watched back-to-back, "Some Kind of Heaven" and "You Can See Everything" share a clear cinematic DNA. Darkness falls over faces at just the right moment. Scenes ring out a touch too long for comfort. Space and distance are deployed with exacting purpose. Both movies imbue the viewer with an anxious sense of, "Yeah, I'm not supposed to be here." But the thing is, Oppenheim stays.

Should you attempt to tackle both films as a weekend viewing assignment — fun! — let that be one takeaway. Maybe humans will never fully know each other's innermost thoughts and motives, never agree on a single, neat narrative and maybe that makes life a rich tapestry. But the art of staying, of asking more questions, of trying to figure each other out? That part will never get old.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephrhayes on Instagram.

Photo credit: Denys Kostyuchenko at Unsplash