Apple Cider Vinegar Review

There are few stories more demoralizing than that of Belle Gibson, the lifestyle influencer at the center of Apple Cider Vinegar. In the 2010s, Gibson built her brand by faking cancer and used the resulting clout to encourage actual cancer patients to spurn conventional, evidence-based medical treatment in favor of “clean” eating and a handful of other inadvisable, pseudoscientific (and potentially lethal) alternative therapies. If just reading that sentence blackened your soul a little, I suggest you stay far, far away from Netflix’s latest scammer drama, a six-episode spectacle that fictionalizes – and gleefully, cynically emulates – Gibson’s many deceptions. Though there are other reasons to skip it as well.

After a montage of Gibson’s fantastical claims centered on the major whopper that she cured terminal brain cancer with a healthy diet, the series opens in an L.A. publicist’s office. Belle, played by Kaitlyn Dever, is there to beg one of Hollywood’s best fixers to perform emergency surgery on her reputation. Before launching into her sob-story, she looks at the camera and announces, “This is a true story based on a lie.” That’s at least an accurate way to set the tone for this exhausting exercise in hatred and hypocrisy. Apple Cider Vinegar manages to both relentlessly scorn Gibson, rendering her inhuman, and shill her lies with panache. And the spectacle begins early: Within the first five minutes, Dever and her co-stars Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Alycia Debnam-Carey, and Aisha Dee do a choreographed dance to Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” The six hours that follow offer a heavily fictionalized version of the Belle Gibson story. It’s ostensibly based on Nick Toscano and Beau Donelly’s exposé The Woman Who Fooled the World, but creator Samantha Strauss has set up a show that delights in obfuscation as much as its main character.

Apple Cider Vinegar doesn’t shed light on Gibson’s myriad bizarre deceptions; it uses them as a storytelling framework. The show is intentionally disorienting as it jumps around in time, pulling details of Gibson’s life from journalistic recountings as often as it pulls them from thin air. Watching it will only further confuse you about Gibson’s age (at present, 33) and her experiences with fraudulent cancer “doctors” (unproven), both topics about which she has been famously inconsistent. Further muddying the waters are unverified backstory details such as Belle running away to live with a grown man at age 12 and suffering a miscarriage. The final episode even forgoes ending title cards that might tell viewers what happened next – like the fact that Gibson is still dodging a six-figure fine incurred from her crimes. Instead, Dever-as-Gibson simply reappears on screen and instructs viewers to “google it.”

There are some merits to this telling of the story. Unlike Belle – who’s rendered cartoonishly despicable in spite of Dever’s savvy acting and impressive mastery of an Australian accent – the secondary characters offer much-needed emotional depth. Debnam-Carey and Cobham-Hervey bring gravity to the proceedings as Milla, a woo-woo cancer influencer whose dismissal of mainstream medicine costs her dearly, and Lucy, an admirer of Belle’s who is actively battling breast cancer. If only their arcs, which reckon with mortality, powerlessness, and the very vulnerable mindset that Gibson so infamously exploited, were given as much screen time as Belle’s narcissistic meltdowns.

“Stories were meant to connect us, but our compulsion to narrativize and dramatize heroes’ journeys, goodies, baddies – we’ve become incapable of objective thought,” Belle’s fixer, Hek (Phoenix Raei), explains to camera at the beginning of one episode, mid-coke binge. Such feeble attempts at self-awareness bring to mind Gibson’s halting admissions of guilt during her infamous 60 Minutes Australia interview. Yes, she lied about having cancer, but it’s not her fault. Yes, Netflix has answered Gibson’s soulless actions with even further cynicism, but that’s just because there’s a problem with society.

Pass. That’s precisely the kind of intellectual dishonesty and sensationalism that allows influencers like Gibson to flourish. Producers can cast the best actors possible for this project and insert as many winking lines into the script as they want, but their motivations are still obvious. They’re right there, in the first few minutes, courtesy of Britney. Apple Cider Vinegar loves what Belle Gibson did, even if it knows that she’s toxic.