Susan Granger’s review of “Apple Cider Vinegar” (Netflix)
Having been married to a neurologist for 27 years, I have always had a healthy skepticism about the ‘miraculous’ claims of alternative medicine – and watching Netflix’s limited crime drama series “Apple Cider Vinegar” confirmed them.
WARNING: There is a major ‘spoiler’ concluding this review because the showrunner, Australian writer/producer Samantha Strauss, deftly deflects any kind of satisfactory conclusion with an irritating: “Look it up on Google.”
Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever) is an audacious single mother/influencer who launched a wellness empire in Australia by convincing people that she’d had brain cancer and successfully cured herself with a holistic approach and all-natural lifestyle, chronicled in her 2014 book “The Whole Pantry.”
Her meandering “true-ish story based on a lie” is related via a confusingly jumbled timeline, incorporating her frenetic long-term relationship with Clive Rothwell (Ashley Zuckerman) and the young son they’ve raised together.
Belle leveraged the success of her social media app to build the Whole Pantry brand, encompassing cookbooks in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. She earned half a million dollars in less than two years, spurred by (unsubstantiated) claims that her brain cancer had spread to her blood, spleen, uterus and liver.
Intertwined, there are case histories of two ‘real’ cancer patients: blogger Milla (Alyssa Debnam-Carey) and ‘believer’ Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) – both reject treatment in favor of pseudoscience, claiming: “Western medicine is run by pharma giants and male doctors who are immune to our concerns and only want to make money and boss us around.”
Inspired by the non-fiction book “The Woman Who Fooled the World” by investigative journalists Beau Donelly & Nick Toscano, it’s scripted by Samantha Strauss, Anya Beyersdorf & Angela Betzien – who fail to provide a satisfactory answer to what happened to the disgraced fraudster. Instead, the final scenes focus on survivors.
SPOILER: In April, 2017, the Federal Court of Australia ruled that Belle was “misleading” & “deceptive,” fining her more than $1 million. That was later reduced to $410,000, which she still has not paid although her Melbourne home has been raided twice in an attempt to recoup the money she owes.
Segments of Belle Gibson’s interview with “60 Minutes” Australia can be viewed on YouTube.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Apple Cider Vinegar” is an exasperating, scamming 7 – with all six episodes streaming on Netflix.
