I’m in awe of Kaitlyn Dever. Of course, I was in awe of her well before I saw her in the lead role of the Netflix Australian series Apple Cider Vinegar. The 5’3” Phoenix native grew up in Dallas and did a stint with the Dallas Young Actors Studio. Only 28, she’s been acting since childhood, so her resumé is quite stacked. She has played everything from a member of a backwoods Christian snake-handling cult in Them That Follow to a Hollywood actress in need of a vacation in a Hotels.com commercial. She can sing (Dear Evan Hansen), she can play a role with minimal dialogue (No One Will Save You), and she’s going to be on the upcoming season of The Last of Us as Ellie’s girlfriend. Her star turn as a real-life wellness fraudster is a reason to click on Apple Cider Vinegar during a Netflix evening, but it has more to recommend itself.
She portrays Belle Gibson, a pregnant health insurance claims worker in Melbourne in 2009. When she throws a baby shower for herself and none of her invitees show up, she takes to the then-fledgling social-media platform of Facebook to vent. When a few users ask about her vague allusions to health problems, she upgrades her migraine headaches to a full-fledged brain tumor, and sympathy pours forth online. She turns that sympathy into a multimillion dollar business, claiming that she has cured herself of terminal brain cancer through an organic diet, and sells her recipes and health advice through a commercial outlet she sets up and calls The Whole Pantry.
It’s not against the law to tell people that you have cancer when you don’t, but it is quite illegal to hold fundraisers for charitable causes and then not pass the money along. This is what took down the real-life Belle Gibson, along with an infamous TV interview with 60 Minutes Australia, where she wore a hot pink sweater and wouldn’t even give a straight answer about her age. The show re-creates this, and I can’t believe it didn’t include this response from Belle: “I’ve always been raised as being currently 26 years old.”
Series creator Samantha Straus is guilty of a couple of balky framing devices, one set in 2015 when Belle meets with a crisis manager (Phoenix Raei) at an L.A. PR firm, and one set somewhat earlier when Belle’s disgruntled former assistant (Aisha Dee) spills the tea to journalists at the Melbourne newspaper The Age, one of whom (Mark Coles Smith) has a wife (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) who’s one of Belle’s followers and is refusing treatment for her cancer. Five of the six episodes have characters breaking the fourth wall to deliver legal disclaimers to the camera. “Belle Gibson has not been paid for this re-creation of her story,” Belle tells us. “Fuckers!”
The needle drops are a tad obvious (Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “vampire”), but it is crushingly right when Belle breaks into her version of Katy Perry’s “Roar” during a fundraising speech while her book publisher (Catherine McClements) turns visibly green beside her. The opening credit sequence contains a choreographed dance number with the main cast members dancing to Britney Spears’ “Toxic”, and I wish we could see the whole thing somewhere. Memo to Netflix: That’s what YouTube is for.
When Belle attends the funeral of a rival wellness blogger (Alycia Debnam-Carey) who refused treatment for her cancer, it makes for a nightmarish set piece, as she gets static from the dead woman’s relatives and breaks into sobs so loud that everyone assumes she’s faking it. Of course, she actually is under a great deal of strain because her business is imploding, and Dever gives us a great silently-boiling-over reaction on an airplane when the reporters from The Age email her a detailed list of questions about her medical history and she knows she’s cornered.
She makes the series into a fascinating study of a narcissistic personality who invents illnesses for the clicks. A quack doctor who sells her an AU$10,000 magnetic healing machine nevertheless gives her some real advice: “Your son is afraid to be alone with you. He thinks you’re going to die, and he won’t know what to do. That’s terrifying for a little boy.” Belle promises to come clean about her diagnosis after a confrontation with her assistant, then curls up into a fetal position in her shower and starts dictating a press release to the camera where she quadruples down on her cancer. (I do mean that literally. The real Belle Gibson at one point stated that she had four different types of cancer while continuing to post photographs of herself looking beautiful and going out with her family.)
It’s tempting to draw parallels between Belle and the anti-vaxxers who found an audience during the Covid pandemic when we all should have been throwing things at them. It’s tempting, but it’s also too easy. I could point out that Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin became household names and national heroes for developing polio vaccines in the 1950s, and you’d conclude that people were smarter back then. But that would be wrong — this was right after millions of Americans bought Hadacol, a tonic that was supposed to cure all sorts of ills. (It was 12 percent alcohol, which undoubtedly made its users feel better about their aches and pains.) The Louisiana state senator who invented and sold it then gave a series of gleeful radio interviews about how he had become a multimillionaire by selling a product that did nothing.
I think the lesson here is that human stupidity and gullibility are constants. We all like to think we know our own bodies better than the medical professionals, and doctors can exacerbate this by behaving arrogantly and acting like there isn’t stuff that’s unknown to medical science. That’s how you get people who think they can cure themselves with leeches or crystals or mānuka honey or dancing naked in the forest with sticks. Heaven knows the internet and social media have made it easier to spread fake cures, something Belle Gibson figured out earlier than most. The point of Apple Cider Vinegar and Dever’s shifty and cunning performance is learning how to spot and avoid the Belles of the world.
