We live in an age of scamfluencers. Their stories are constantly adapted into films and television shows, often painting a melodramatic portrait of said scammers and absolving them of their sins in a fictional manner. Netflix seems to be the streamer most interested in telling these stories, with series like “Inventing Anna” fascinating audiences and rehabilitating the images of once-disgraced scammers. They’re back for a new endeavor, this time focusing on Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever).
Ten years ago, Gibson took the world by storm with a wellness app, a cookbook, and an Instagram account that amassed tens of thousands of followers. The success of these endeavors hinged on a fact that ended up being revealed to be a seismic lie: she had terminal brain cancer and healed her illness with a strict whole-food diet. However, Belle wasn’t the only one, with blogger Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey) coming before her to claim the same thing. The difference between them was that, unlike Belle, Milla truly did have cancer.
The relationship between the two women, no matter how sparse it may be at any given time, is what Netflix’s latest series “Apple Cider Vinegar” is built around. When we first meet Belle, she’s a young pregnant woman searching for a place to belong. Despite her initially coming to us as a sympathetic figure, she quickly exposes her inner core through white lies, bursts of anger towards her mother, and an unhealthy social media obsession. It’s here that she finds Milla, a woman who, after a cancer diagnosis, starts a blog detailing her holistic treatments. Infatuated with the attention and lifestyle Milla has cultivated, Belle gives it a try.
What first appears to be a show for those mainly looking to marvel at Gibson’s excess of wealth and lies slowly unravels into a series that is more interested in what exactly made Gibson commit these crimes. In doing so, we are forced to hold space with her, often in suffocating rooms or cars, the camera focusing tightly on her face as various emotions pass over it. Dever plays this with a strict sense of empathy and nuance, wielding a pain burrowed so deeply inside the woman that it can only come out amidst deep growls and tears–whether they’re slightly fabricated or not.
If we compare this to Julia Garner’s performance as Anna Delvey, the latter felt like a hollow imitation meant to poke fun and humiliate its subject. Here, Dever uses her talents to understand a woman who still appears to this day as if she doesn’t even truly know herself. It’s what makes “Apple Cider Vinegar” stand out amongst other shows about scammers: while our main character’s misdeeds accumulate, the show isn’t afraid to question her motives and if she is simply a product of a culture obsessed with showcasing their lifestyles.
Her sins are egregious, yes, but the show never once tries to absolve her of them. Instead, we watch as she dupes her followers and treats her friends and family like coworkers, wreaking havoc upon her own life and those of everyone around her. Sometimes, it feels like she understands what she’s doing is wrong, but that understanding is quickly dashed away with a flip of her hair and a glance down at her Instagram comments. She’s fascinating to watch; her faults and the catastrophe she creates is impossible to look away from despite the upheaval it causes in her life.
Despite its watchability, something is missing from “Apple Cider Vinegar.” The series’ emotional beats hit most of the time, especially when Debnam-Carey is on screen, playing a young woman attempting to hold on to her mortality by any means necessary. But the show falters quite a bit when she’s not on screen. While the series feels desperate to engage with the dark side of wellness culture, peeling back its glamorous outer layers and exposing its rotten inner core, it doesn’t necessarily have much to say. We live in a world where holistic healing videos on TikTok garner tens of thousands of views each day, and the people who see these videos deserve a stronger stance from a show that often feels geared to a young audience.
In one of the final episodes, Belle’s former friend and assistant, Chanelle (Aisha Dee), describes her as she would a vicious parasite: “Belle doesn’t have friends. She has hosts.” We watch the protagonist wield connections like weapons, weaving her life into others’ until they almost become congealed. Although the series begins as a warning cry to a generation easily influenced by the people they see on screens, “Apple Cider Vinegar” quickly unfolds into a simple character study. With each episode, it loses momentum in saying something important, instead becoming a practice in exercising empathy towards a broken and inherently flawed woman. Although this risks breaking apart the series’ foundation, it simultaneously makes it one of the more interesting shows in this genre.