Two wellness influencers who claim healthy eating cured them of cancer find internet fame, but when it’s revealed that one’s brand is built on lies, it all comes crashing down.
“This is a true story based on lies.” It’s the line that opens every episode of Netflix’s brilliant new series Apple Cider Vinegar, along with the constant reiteration that Belle Gibson, the shady Instagrammer at the center of the story, wasn’t paid to recreate it, nor was anyone else involved in her story. Often told through characters who break the fourth wall, it’s a perfectly ironic foundation for this strange, yet prophetic tale about social media’s tendency to sell us snake oil.
Creator: Samantha Strauss
Stars: Kaitlyn Dever, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Aisha Dee
If you weren’t aware of the online influencer drama during the 2010s, Gibson is an Australian blogger who gained millions of followers after sharing that she had brain cancer and posting healthy recipes that she claims helped her manage the disease. Her popularity led to an app, a partnership with Apple, a book, media appearances, magazine awards and more – until two journalists discovered that the charity money she had promised to cancer-stricken families never materialised, and her diagnoses (and almost everything about her) were confirmed to be complete fabrications.
Kaitlyn Dever, the breakout of Booksmart and future star of The Last Of Us, is remarkable as Gibson, fully encapsulating the influencer’s edgy, relentless, fawning and oddly charming energy with total commitment as well as an impeccable Australian accent. Her story is intertwined with others, some based in reality, some entirely fictional. There’s Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Belle’s muse, Instagram’s top competitor and a real sarcoma victim; Chanelle (Aisha Dee), Milla’s friend, who becomes Belle’s manager before becoming a source for the paper to try to uncover the truth; and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), a terminally ill cancer patient who gets sucked into Gibson’s rhetoric.
The thread-shifting and incessant time-jumping—between Belle’s younger days as a new mother, the height of her online fame, and her attempts at crisis management—can be disconcerting. The filmmaking is quick and striking, though, using moments of surrealism, inventive depictions of social media use, and on-camera moments to keep things fresh.
But Apple Cider Vinegar’s best decision is to decenter Gibson for much of the series’ running time and flesh out the characters around her, juxtaposing their real, extremely sad confrontations with cancer against her shallow, dangerous, unstoppable pretensions about hers. As their narratives become more tragic, Gibson’s (though it’s crazy to believe and riddled with its own share of tragedy) ends up being far less interesting.
The show also manages to avoid potential harm by not going into too much detail about the diet Milla in particular is preaching, instead showing empathy for why she fell down that rabbit hole and laying out the harsh consequences that rejecting conventional medicine can have. It takes a certain amount of investment in this kind of online controversy to stay engaged in the minutiae of apple cider vinegar, but if that kind of story appeals to you, this refined retelling of one of the most egregious examples of deception of the social media age offers plenty to enjoy.
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