Apple Cider Vinegar is necessary viewing in an era of woo-woo misinformation and health scammers
It was a simpler time online in the early 2010s: you took a photo of your latte art, slapped on an Inkwell filter and watched the little hearts roll in. Under this innocent facade of self-documentation on Instagram, food and health became a millennial obsession. Hordes of girls were fascinated by plant-based diets. Orthorexia (an eating disorder in which one focuses obsessively on being healthy) was on the rise. And social media influencing was newly big business for the women – and it was, broadly speaking, women – who were savvy, thin and young enough to sell themselves, their lifestyles and their outlandish claims to curious followers. Enter: Belle Gibson, the real-life subject of Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar.
Active participants of this early internet wellness era will remember how Belle falsely sold a generation of girls (some of them very sick) a made-up story of how she cured a cancer she didn’t have with whole foods. Those who aren’t familiar with the now-thirtysomething Australian are likely to see how the show is marketed and packaged as fiction, based heavily on true crime, and then Google her. They’ll discover her infamous quest to heal her fake terminal illness “through nutrition, patience, determination and love” rather than modern medicine, and how it ended in her undoing.
Given that the story of Belle’s hubristic downfall is out there for all to read about, this drama could have been a boring, six-part show on sociopathy. At least it would’ve been psychologically rich. But it’s so much more than that. Belle is played with convincing arrogance by Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Dopesick), who brings a lively emotional range to this villain, whether she’s luring in men to use as pawns or having a hysterical meltdown any time she feels threatened (there are many, many such breakdowns). If anything, familiarity with the subject matter should help viewers relax into this Shakespearian tragedy of epic proportions, and allow the series to speak loudly and eloquently to the current climate of woo-woo misinformation and health scammers.
Netflix has clearly learnt a lot from its Baby Reindeer debacle of taking liberties with the “this is a true story” banner. Each episode of Apple Cider Vinegar starts with a disclaimer, as a character says to camera: “This is a real story, based on a lie. Some names have been changed for the protection of the innocent. Belle Gibson has not been paid for the recreation of her story.” This Fleabag-esque fourth-wall breaking suits an agile production style, where we flit between past and present and different people’s perspectives. We follow Belle’s story from rags to riches to rags, alongside investigative journalists who work to reveal the real story of this high scammer, the suffering of one of her followers Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), and the uneasy life and career of Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey) – a Queensland blogger who believes she is beating cancer with a strict juice diet and coffee enemas.
The most tense and compulsive scenes arise from Belle and Milla’s rivalry. Narcissistic Belle single white females Milla, malevolently embedding herself into Milla’s life to use her blogging career as a template for her own. Yes, Belle wants the attention she gets from telling people she was ill. There’s the control she feels over her life when she spins her web of lies. But the show suggests that it’s Belle’s core desire to compete with her enemy that ultimately leads to her downfall.
Apple Cider Vinegar takes its prisoners and is blunt about waving around the key. Blame for the Belle phenomenon is placed at the feet of the women’s mags. These publications promoted and legitimised influencers like Belle, who made health claims with no scientific backing. One uncomfortable scene in episode three sees Belle and Milla going head to head at a Cosmopolitan party for girlbosses in business, which you can’t watch without thinking: why didn’t the glossy mags do their due diligence? Some blame is apportioned to the publishing industry too: we see the way that a leading book editor is taken in by Belle’s nonsense over drinks, and ends up publishing her book, The Whole Pantry.
All of this paints an appropriately grim picture of women’s culture in the 2010s: were we too dumb, too career-obsessed, too self-interested to make sense of anything? It’s certainly an accurate throwback to what it felt to be a young woman at that time – conditioned by apps, our mothers and pop culture to aspire to thinness, wealth, “health” and entrepreneurialism. That the show is named after a holistic medicine classic – one still widely used today despite serious doubts over its benefits – rather than Belle Gibson herself puts some of the burden of her success back onto us.
Any embarrassment you might feel watching it is deftly undercut by the show’s empathy. It demonstrates how the healthcare industry has failed women and lost their trust with a model focused on male bodies. Women like the dying Lucy and even influencer Milla, who profited from her own delusions, are the victims here. They’re fantasists but they’re desperate to be listened to, to be helped.
Apple Cider Vinegar is a timely, smart commission; Belle’s story was once a scandal, but is terrifyingly mundane in an anti-expert, post-truth world. When the real-life Belle was originally unveiled as a conman by Australian journalists, it was a huge global story. Today, pseudoscience is a booming mainstream industry, no longer in the conspiratorial fringes. It used to be Belle Gibson’s world; now we are very much living in it.
