‘Apple Cider Vinegar' Is a Scammer Docudrama With Bite
'Apple Cider Vinegar,' on Netflix, is the latest scammer docudrama, another galling true story zhuzhed up for maximum bingeyness. This one is about two scams, though: an Australian woman perpetrating a cancer fraud, and the wellness industry more broadly.
Kaitlyn Dever stars as Belle Gibson, who rose to fame as a cancer and food blogger. The show weaves her story together with that of two other characters who actually do have cancer: Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Belle's blogger idol, who is convinced she can heal her own cancer, and later her mother's, with juicing, and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), a breast-cancer patient desperate for alternatives to the brutality of chemotherapy. Presumably 'Coffee Enema' was not as enticing a title as 'Apple Cider Vinegar,' but that pseudoscientific practice occupies a lot screen time here. A lot.
The story unfolds in jumbled timelines, mostly between 2009 and 2015. The size and gnarliness of the lesions on Milla's arms situate where she is in her prognosis, and Lucy grows increasingly wan. Belle's 'journey,' in contrast, is told by the state of her veneers — the brighter and shinier, the more recent. Belle's grifts began in her teens, but she started honing her cancer story on mommy message boards as a young mother. 'One of the worst things that can happen to a person happened to me!' she declares, lapping up each molecule of pity she can wring from others.
'Vinegar' has more depth and bite than many other scam stories, with more hypotheses about what might motivate someone to perpetrate social frauds: bad mom, absent dad, rapacious need for attention — the same things that lead a lot of people to a life on the stage. Alienation and desperation are powerful motivators, and Devers's performance makes Belle just sympathetic enough to reel you in.
For those who want more from the world of cancer frauds, the documentary series 'Scamanda,' based on a podcast of the same name, airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on ABC. (Episodes arrive the next day on Hulu; the series debuted on Jan. 30.) Amanda Riley lied for years about having cancer, blogging about it and giving talks at her church, scamming friends and community members out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where 'Vinegar' focuses on the perpetrator, 'Scamanda' is more concerned with the victims, with their humiliation and revulsion over being had. It's a mediocre doc, but the story is wild.
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