The Netflix compliance department has clearly learned something from what happened when they allowed Baby Reindeer to be subtitled as “A True Story”.
Then, the subject of that drama quickly took Netflix to court, with claims the true story wasn’t entirely true. Apple Cider Vinegar, by contrast, makes truth, lies, fraud, dissembling and misinformation its very subjects. This is a true story based on a lie that is based on a truth that wasn’t true.
What it shares with Baby Reindeer, however, is that it is very good. The six-parter tells the story of Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever) an online Australian wellness guru who prospered in the days when people thought some stuff on the internet might even be accurate (i.e. around 2010).
Belle claimed to have eaten her way healthy out of a terminal brain cancer diagnosis; she then created a recipe app that offered to do the same for other cancer sufferers. The problem was that Gibson never had brain cancer and so the goodwill, popping heart emojis and no-negativity vibes that suffused Belle’s cute business venture were all a sham. It is not possible to cure yourself with healthy eating, as a likeably blunt oncologist tells a reporter at one point.
At the centre of the whole spiralling diddle is Gibson, a narcissist from the Anna Delvey school of self-delusion who preys on the blind faith of the otherwise hopeless. Apple Cider Vinegar (the title refers to one of Gibson’s later panaceas that drinking apple cider vinegar cures ringworm… by expunging tape worms… from your mouth) stands or falls on whether we can maintain any empathy at all for Gibson. It is a stretch: we know she is a grifter from the outset, and we see in horrible detail the damage her bad science fantasies cause. But if she were a gurning monster, no one would care why she did what she did.
The series succeeds because of Dever, who is sensational throughout, but also because of how the story is told. It bombards you with unreliable narrators, characters suddenly talking to camera, fractured timelines, digressions and on-screen graphics and captions. There is no single narrative keel. Normally this would be a failing, but over the course of the six episodes it turns out to be a strategy. Apple Cider Vinegar is trying to show how truth, a single definitive perspective, has been so devalued by the kaleidoscope of fact-adjacent opinions online (and people willing to parrot them), that someone like Belle Gibson was able to sell her quite obviously snakey snake oil as an elixir. The drama attempts to recreate that sense of how, if you don’t like some facts then don’t worry, some other ones will be along in just a minute. It’s disorientating but it works.
It’s also extremely well written and performed, vaulting the occasional longueurs of the middle episodes of a premium mini-series with some properly penned supporting characters. Gibson’s friends are described at one point as “just hosts” to her, yet writer Samantha Strauss treats the ensemble cast with as much care as she does her star turn. Best of all, in the closing episodes a current of real anger surges through the coda as we see how selfishness and lies in the online world have bitter consequences in the real one. Apple Cider Vinegar is a story of fake it to make it – but it’s one that shows how making it can be taking it too.
