‘Apple Cider Vinegar’: A Famous Wellness Influencer Lies About Having Brain Cancer

Recounting the rise and fall of Belle Gibson, an Australian snake-oil saleswoman who made a name for herself via a wellness business that was predicated on lies and fraud, Apple Cider Vinegar is another entry in the burgeoning subgenre of stories about entrepreneurial female hucksters that also includes Inventing Anna and The Dropout.

Belle claimed that she had brain cancer and cured herself by eating right, and she parlayed that narrative into a hit app, The Whole Pantry, and a cookbook, as well as an enormous online following that bought what she was selling about the superiority of holistic treatments over traditional medicine. She was a phony and a cheat who believed that she knew better than experts and convinced legions of dupes to follow her, all for wealth and fame. At a moment when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the precipice of running the country’s Health and Human Services department, hers is a cautionary tale of almost shocking timeliness.

Premiering on Netflix on Feb. 6, Apple Cider Vinegar bills itself at the outset of each episode as “a true story based on a lie” via characters breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the camera. Samantha Strauss’ limited series doesn’t stop there with the formal flourishes. On-screen emojis and text, dream sequences, fractured chronology, rapid-fire cutting, and more montages than one can count are part of this frazzled package, which aims—with some success—to replicate a sense of the digital sphere’s hyper-speed information and feedback overload.

Such embellishments jazz up what might otherwise be more straightforward material. At the same time, they tap into a sense of the fundamentally untrustworthy and illusory nature of the internet, where anyone can claim—or purport to be—anything and create a phenomenon based entirely on wish-fulfillment fantasy.

As with its aforementioned small-screen predecessors, Apple Cider Vinegar is a showcase for its star Kaitlyn Dever, who flashes big counterfeit smiles and spills torrents of crocodile tears as Belle, who sits down in 2015 with crisis manager Hek (Phoenix Raei) to strategize how best to respond to allegations that she never had brain cancer and, thus, built an empire on a falsehood.

Throughout Strauss’ show, Belle espouses the conviction that it’s in her power to write her narrative, and while that ultimately proves imprudent, it speaks to the internet’s capacity for fostering and legitimizing disinformation as truth. Belle is a Harold Hill-style charlatan with a modern twist: thanks to 21st-century technology, she can not only spread her message further than any ancestor might have dreamed, but she has the ability to prey upon people’s emotions in direct, enticing, and seemingly intimate ways.

Dever’s full-throated performance captures Belle’s greed and deceptiveness, not to mention her gift for acutely reading people, pinpointing their weak spots, and manipulating them to do her bidding. She’s an unlikable woman who understands how to make people feel as if they like her, whereas her wellness-industry idol Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey) is an inherently friendly and compassionate woman who inspires her followers through a sincere belief in her mission.

For Milla, that crusade involves ignoring her doctors’ advice to have her tumor-riddled arm amputated and embarking on a quest to heal herself via alternative means. At least initially, it proves triumphant, earning her a new boyfriend, Arlo (Chai Hansen), a thriving influencer career, and ostensible therapeutic results courtesy of a Mexican clinic whose regimens involve downing 13 juice drinks, and undergoing five coffee enemas, each day.

Whether admiring or loathing each other, Belle and Milla are two sides of the same coin, the only difference being that the former is intent on deceiving others and the latter is simply tricking herself and her mom (Susie Porter), who suffers greatly for her daughter’s recklessness.

Apple Cider Vinegar additionally focuses on Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who takes to Belle’s gibberish after being diagnosed with breast cancer, much to the chagrin of her journalist boyfriend (and future husband) Justin (Mark Coles Smith). As with Milla’s mom and, eventually, a young boy named Hunter whose mother is desperate to save him, Lucy is a stand-in for the untold number of casualties caused by Belle’s scam. With the aid of Milla’s friend Chanelle (Aisha Dee)—who opts to work for Belle when her star begins ascending—Justin sets about investigating Belle, whom he views as the unabashed grifter that her lousy mom (Essie Davis) always knew her to be.

There’s no doubt that Justin is correct about Belle in Apple Cider Vinegar, and those in her orbit ultimately come to see the light, including Clive (Ashley Zukerman), whom she ropes into being her romantic partner and surrogate father for her son, and then blackmails into staying by her side.

To some extent, everyone in the series is guilty of something (avarice, malice, stupidity), and Strauss clearly (if frantically) censures the wellness industry for thriving on, and profiting off, grief and desperation that it often has no means of effectively addressing. In dire straits, people want answers, and to an amazing degree, Belle grasps how to provide them, utilizing social media apps like Instagram to dispense uplifting magic-thinking fairy tales about clean eating and living as the cures for any malaise.

Apple Cider Vinegar damns shrewdly all the way to a final note that cheekily underscores the internet’s central (and potentially unreliable) role in giving us the data we crave. Unfortunately, its primary points are so evident from the start that it mostly plays as a foreseeable trainwreck in slow motion.

There’s unquestionably some pleasure in watching a swindler like Belle get her just desserts, especially considering how engagingly loathsome Dever renders her. Yet its drama is relatively predictable, and each new plot development serves to merely reconfirm what the proceedings have already imparted: namely, that science rather than hope is the surest route to survival; that arrogance and unfounded faith are, in medical situations, a deadly combination; and that sunshiny influencers selling the keys to happily-ever-afters aren’t be trusted.

Still, there are far worse things in 2025 than an assured if repetitive series that screams, with authority, that anyone sick should do research, talk with friends and family, and then get off the internet and listen to professionals.