Watching the hit Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar is a bit like eating a whole bag of Haribo Tangfastics (not that I’ve ever done such a thing, of course). If it’s addictively delicious, it’s also very likely to make you queasy. I’m about as sceptical as it’s possible to be when it comes to so-called wellness, an industry whose global value is predicted to be worth an eye-popping $8.5trn by 2027. My participation in such matters begins and ends with Pilates; for everything else, I see the doctor. But this series, though distinctly sugar-coated, has so much to say about life in the 21st century it’s impossible not to feel a tiny bit complicit with some of the various deceptions at which it rather jauntily jabs a finger.
It tells the story of Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever), an Australian influencer who built a business empire around her claim that she’d cured herself of terminal brain cancer with positivity and kale. Gibson’s diet app and subsequent cookbook, The Whole Pantry, published by an imprint of Penguin, were on the way to making her rich, until two reporters, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, were tipped off that she had never suffered from cancer (the series is based on their book, The Woman Who Fooled the World). In 2015, Gibson confessed all to a women’s magazine. But she’s still out in the world. Fines she has been ordered to pay following legal action against her are largely outstanding.
In Apple Cider Vinegar – drinking it is supposed to have health benefits, one’s tooth enamel apart – some events and characters are fictionalised, though its makers signal its basic truths with some tongue-in-cheek breaking of the fourth wall (we don’t care about facts… do we?). What’s clever is the way they set Gibson’s story alongside that of another wellness influencer, Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), whom a quick google reveals to be based in part on Jessica Ainsborough, who did have cancer (she died aged 29 in 2015, and Gibson wept copiously at her funeral, though they’d met only once).
Blake doesn’t lie about her health, but her crazed devotion to the teachings of the Hirsch Institute (the name’s made-up, but its regimes resemble those of Gerson therapy, which Ainsborough promoted) is no less dangerous than anything Gibson tells people. Give up chemo, Blake instructs her followers: try juicing and coffee enemas instead. She sends a litre of Costa Rican up her bum five times a day.
Dever is fabulous as Gibson, written here as Becky Sharp for the breath-work and turmeric generation. Her backstory is hardscrabble, but her ruthless need (she is an abyss) works against our feeling sorry for her. To continue the Vanity Fair analogy, she finds herself a gentlemanly Dobbin in the form of Clive (Ashley Zuckerman), a web developer whose chief usefulness (apart from babysitting her small son) lies in the fact that he still plays along even once he discovers she’s a fraud. His collusion is mirrored by Milla’s parents, who know her fixation with bodily purity is no substitute for science, but go along with it anyway, mostly because the reality of her situation is as unbearable to them as it is to her. Hope makes fools of us all.
It’s very busy: intrusive pop, tricksy time frames, love hearts exploding on screen whenever Gibson gets a like. This is exhausting, but it’s also the point. Unlike, say, The Dropout, in which Amanda Seyfried played another fraudster, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame, Apple Cider Vinegar hasn’t only one villain in its sights. Social media encourages lies, fantasies and delusions of all kinds and gradations: the duplicity, it suggests, is systemic. Whatever else is wrong with Gibson – is she bad, or mad? – Instagram helped to bend her out of shape.
That abyss: strangers could briefly fill it with their second-hand approbation and phoney love, but once they grew bored or jealous, or began to feel hateful, she had to adapt, to give them something bigger and sadder in exchange for their emojis. The series doesn’t make excuses for her. But it knows social media is doing none of us any good. Like the apple cider vinegar of its title, it should be consumed extremely sparingly: through a (metaphorical) straw, if you don’t want to be stripped of your sanity.
Apple Cider Vinegar
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone