Apple Cider Vinegar is thoroughly modern. Sickeningly modern. Shake your head, “look what’s become of us” modern. The six-part Netflix miniseries, based on the scandal of disgraced Australian wellness maven Belle Gibson, is twenty-first-century all the way through, just another story of entrepreneurial grift made possible by social media. In this case, the ruse involves dubious cancer diagnoses, shady fundraisers, and treatment “alternatives”—fresh juices, clean eating, and coffee enemas rather than radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery.
Created by Samantha Strauss and starring a chillingly good Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Dopesick) as Gibson, ACV begins at the end of its “true story based on a lie.” Gibson’s successful lifestyle brand, The Whole Pantry, has been brought down by allegations of charity fraud. But this isn’t just a case of lost receipts. Gibson’s story—a gritty single mom with terminal brain cancer, thriving on a regimen of good food, exercise, and positive thinking—doesn’t hold up.
Tongue-in-cheek and ultimately unsparing, Apple Cider Vinegar is an indictment of influencers and their followers. Using technicolor emojis and avant garde animations, it cleverly demonstrates how irresponsibility online—musing about your “lived experience” with raw milk, “just asking questions” about vaccinations, and, in this case, casting doubt on conventional cancer treatment—has actual, real-world consequences.
And yet, for all its Facebook posts and Instagram likes, the internet is the medium, not the message of this show. The internet makes Belle Gibson—mother, supposed cancer survivor, “Libra sun Capricorn rising” as she loves to call herself—an authority on how to treat serious illness. The internet enables viral conspiracy theories, icky parasocial obsessions, and utter falsehoods, and ACV emphasizes the confusing blurriness between truth and fiction again and again, starting each episode with “based on a true story” disclaimers that come from the mouths of its characters. But the internet doesn’t create or explain the needs that Gibson and others in “the space” are trying to meet.
Those needs aren’t modern at all. They’re ancient. We lack control; but we want control. We’re frail; but we want to be strong. Bad things happen; we want to know why. We’re going to die; that’s not acceptable. Gibson’s former fixer summarizes her appeal by recounting a suggested cure for tapeworms, a few glugs of the eponymous apple cider vinegar. “Is that not magic? Drink a little bit of this stuff and you’re all cleansed. Pure again. I mean, how hopeful is that? I’d pay anything, anything, just to feel a little bit better…. A way to soothe this fucking tragedy of being human.”
The internet doesn’t create or explain the needs that Gibson and others in “the space” are trying to meet.
The brilliance of ACV is how seriously it takes that tragedy. This is no triumphal romp in celebration of a con woman’s eventual downfall, as she is uncovered by investigative journalists and brought to justice for her crimes. (In fact, the show doesn’t depict any of the legal consequences, telling viewers that they can Google it for themselves.) No victory lap here.
We lack control. We’re frail. The medical establishment, with its sterile rooms and brusque oncologists recommending amputations and poison drips, has plenty of data. But it often makes those existential realities feel worse—just one more doctor, telling us what to do, treating their patients as less than people. No wonder Lucy, who has breast cancer, opts for organic food and a psychedelic retreat in the rainforest instead of another surgery. She’s in control of what she eats; she’s in control of which plane tickets she buys. “I’m really grateful I listened to my body and have given it what it needs,” says Milla, a wellness influencer who attempts to treat her sarcoma via diet. But we always have less control than we think. “They fucking poisoned me!” shrieks Milla when a cafe’s plant-based burger turns out to be less than 100-percent organic. Similarly, Lucy believes that she owns her own drug trip, but it’s really the shaman who runs the show.
Bad things happen; we want to know why. Daughters and sons and wives and best friends get cancer. Who can we blame? In addition to Big Pharma, peddling us remedies, there’s Big Ultra-Processed Food and Big Lead in Our Water and Big Black Plastic Utensils and all the rest, leaching toxins into the environment. If we know the culprits, we can change our lifestyles, handing over our credit cards to gurus rather than corporate villains, buying off-market black salves and pretty cookbooks instead of pills. It’s a feeble protest. A deadly protest, even. But it’s understandable.
We’re going to die; that’s not acceptable. In Apple Cider Vinegar, a mother seeks out an experimental surgery at any price, and a widower, his wife lost to alternative “cures,” flops helplessly on a bed. The people closest to the patients try to get them to just do the chemo rather than baking the organic peach tart.
“Is that not magic? Drink a little bit of this stuff and you’re all cleansed. Pure again. I mean, how hopeful is that?”
As the cancer patients flee from death, Belle Gibson runs toward it, complaining of migraines and tumors and heart conditions. It’s all for the money, at some level—Belle plays up “the cancer angle” to her financial advantage. As portrayed by Dever, Belle is perfectly hateable. She dismisses the daughter she miscarried as imperfect. She keeps in her own freezer casseroles meant for a family whose son has cancer in her own freezer. She crashes a funeral. She belittles her partner. She locks her son in his room, and terrifies him with a fake seizure.
Even when Belle is vulnerable, it feels like a trick. But if there’s any representative of that “fucking tragedy of being human,” it’s her. She’s both manipulative and manipulated, damaged by childhood neglect, unable to relate to anyone authentically: “I try really hard for them to like me and, in the end, they never ever do.” Desperate for sympathy, she fakes proximity to death to draw mourners to her bedside. It’s not right. But it’s understandable.
That’s another ancient need: We must be loved. The real cancer patients are loved, in life and in death. “She was so lucky to be so loved. You did a good job, okay?” Belle tells the grieving father at the funeral she crashes. She’s jealous of his daughter’s carefully preserved childhood room, with its medals and award certificates and jerseys. She’s jealous of the gathering of bereaved in the backyard, raising their beers with tears on their faces.
Instead: the internet. It’s where Belle gets her affection, via those comments and emojis, an endless drip of affirmation that barely tempers the toxicity. Is any of the admiration real? She must have her suspicions, especially once the stories break of her lies and frauds, and the followers start to turn on her. “Are you going?” she asks her partner as it all falls apart. Clive is staying, he says. “Why?” Belle asks him. Is it because he loves her son, his stepson, too much to leave? “I love both of you,” he answers, but Belle is incredulous. “You don’t love me,” she counters. “You’re lying.”
Clive, deadpan, looks her right in the eyes. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”