We may have a budding Netflix microgenre on our hands. First came Inventing Anna, the story of super-scam artist Anna Sorokin (AKA Anna Delvey, brilliantly played in all her many incarnations by Julia Garner), who glided through New York high society posing as a German heiress while relieving her marks of bountiful sums of money. It was a stylishly and energetically directed tale of one woman’s fabulous chutzpah, talents and ambition put to misdirected use and eventually causing her to come a cropper. Such a tale, too, is Apple Cider Vinegar, which features an equally masterly performance from Dopesick’s Kaitlyn Dever as the wellness influencer Belle Gibson, who built a lucrative empire on the back of her story about beating supposedly terminal brain cancer via healthy living. That story – and you may be ahead of me here – was false. As a different character glances at the camera to say near the start of every episode of the six-part series: “This is a true story based on a lie.” It is also stated that (unlike Sorokin) Gibson has not been paid for the re-creation of her story. “Fuckers,” adds Belle when it’s her turn to open.
The spine of the show, which unfolds back and forth from around 2010, is Gibson’s growing rivalry with another influencer, Milla Blake (Alicia Debnam-Carey) – seemingly inspired by the late Jessica Ainscough – who also promulgates alternative therapies for cancer treatment. The crucial difference between them is that Milla does have cancer and is a true believer in the non-traditional methods that appear to have saved her. A third, not wholly necessary, narrative strand follows another cancer patient, Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who is drawn to Belle’s internet charms and implicit promises.
Milla is the golden girl. She has loving and supportive parents, a good education and the wherewithal to attend retreats, where she meets her loving and supportive boyfriend. Eventually, she finds her way to the expensive Hersch Institute, which claims to cure cancer via coffee enemas and a strict fruit-and-veg diet; this appears to work for her. She also has just the right look for a burgeoning app called Instagram, and quickly gains popularity there.
Belle, we are told, is from an unhappy home overseen by a narcissistic mother, who still glories in diminishing her child wherever possible. Belle has a baby with a toxic man, then escapes – or inveigles her way – into a relationship with a much better bet, a stable older man (Ashley Zukerman). His computer skills are almost as handy as his childminding capabilities when she wants to move on from blogging to building her own app. As one of the first people to become properly suspicious of Belle puts it: “She doesn’t have friends; she has hosts.”
Apple Cider Vinegar does an artful job of layering revelations about Belle’s past with her current actions, so that while we can never fully sympathise with her, we can never enjoy her as a pure villain either. While Milla (and her poor parents, given their heartbreaking due by a great script and superb performances from Susie Porter and Kieran Darcey-Smith) is a study in one kind of desperation and the irrationalities and ideologies it can lead us into, Belle is a study in another. Loneliness and neglect and the longing to be liked result in a repellent neediness. Combine that with thwarted ambition and overlooked talent, and you can see why those like Belle are drawn to a new technology that provides a potentially infinite source of attention. Apple Cider Vinegar beautifully walks the line between understanding and asking us to forgive this. It never forgets the harms done by the wellness industry to the desperate: those searching for hope who buy the snake oil, enriching its purveyors and potentially suffering deadly consequences (in the cases of those with illnesses like cancer).
Apple Cider Vinegar is a fast, drily witty, acutely intelligent, compassionate and furious commentary on greed, need, mass delusion, self-deception, the exploitation of the credulous, and the enabling of insidious new forms of all of these by technology. If you think the script by creator Samantha Strauss is occasionally over the top (“I’m amazed that my story resonated!” says Belle to one adoring crowd, and: “In my commitment to authenticity … I’ve learned to seek out what’s raw and honest”), I suggest you go and listen to a few of her ilk online. You won’t believe your ears. Just make sure you don’t believe anything else either.
