‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ Review: Kaitlyn Dever in Netflix Wellness-Scammer Saga That Serves Nothing New

What, exactly, do you hope to feel at the end of a scammer saga?

Do you look forward to being amused by the audacity of the con? Giddy that they (almost) got away with it? Maybe you want to experience righteous indignation at the harm they inflicted upon others, or satisfaction in knowing that you’d never have fallen for it. Do you wish for the bad people to be punished? Celebrated? A little of both, somehow, at once?

If you’re not sure — neither, it seems, is Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar. The based-on-a-true-story drama veers all over the place in time, tone and theme, serving up a little bit of everything but not enough of anything to fully sink our teeth into.

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The scammer in question is Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever, adopting a solid Australian accent), an influencer who became famous around 2012 for having cured her own brain cancer by eschewing conventional medical treatment in favor of healthy eating. So inspiring is her journey that she’s parlayed it into a wellness mini-empire, including a bestselling app with a cookbook on the way — only for it all to come tumbling down in 2014, when it was revealed that she’d been faking her illness the whole time.

This isn’t a spoiler: The hourlong premiere finds Belle already in the middle of her scandal, pleading with her crisis PR manager (Phoenix Raei) that she’s innocent, that she can fix this, that she’s simply been misunderstood. From there, Apple Cider Vinegar’s six chapters jump back and forth between the “rise” part of Belle’s arc and the “fall,” with occasional flashes to scenes we’ve seen already or haven’t seen yet, or detours to earlier points in her biography.

Belle’s tale is intertwined with the concurrent one of Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), another young and beautiful influencer who makes a career of explaining how she beat cancer through a strict dietary regimen. The difference is that Milla (evidently inspired by “wellness warrior” Jessica Ainscough) actually is sick, and really does buy what she’s selling.

Also threaded in throughout is the journey of Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), a breast cancer patient with the thankless job of serving as a generic stand-in for the kind of person who might fall for Belle and Milla’s snake oil, and Justin (Mark Coles Smith), her journalist husband.

If the multipronged approach can get awfully frenetic, it is of a piece with the narrative it’s unspooling — one rooted in the rhythms of social media, where you can skip between stories with a flick of a thumb or a mindless click can send you tumbling down a rabbit hole. The mid-2010s Instagram vibe is augmented by the floods of emoji or comments that crowd the screen as Belle and Milla drink in the attention or shrink from criticism.

The aesthetic is also, unfortunately for Apple Cider Vinegar, very much in line with the rash of slick and stylized grifter tales from 2022. The comparison makes the new series feel a bit stale, despite Belle’s story being lesser known (at least outside of Australia) than most of those, and Belle herself less unique than larger-than-life personalities like Inventing Anna’s Anna Delvey or WeCrashed’s Adam Neumann.

Don’t get me wrong: Dever’s performance is persuasive as always, and she nails the head-spinning mix of false modesty, extravagant flattery and self-pitying tears that Belle uses to ingratiate herself to useful marks like her long-suffering boyfriend (Ashley Zukerman) or her editor (Catherine McClements).

But the psychological portrait doesn’t run that deep, and the biggest developments in her career as a con artist, like her idea to launch her Whole Pantry app, strike seemingly out of the blue. It’s not especially interesting to watch her come up with these schemes, nor illuminating to watch her get away with them.

The choice to focus primarily on Belle comes at the expense of the more nuanced material around her. Milla occupies a fascinating position as both the unwitting perpetrator and the unfortunate victim of her own bullshit, but her emotional arc goes somewhat underexplored despite copious screen time. She’s there primarily to serve as Belle’s more sympathetic foil.

Likewise, though Aisha Dee’s Chanelle functions as the link between all the show’s disparate storylines — she’s Milla’s best friend and Belle’s assistant and a key figure in the latter’s downfall — we get only limited access to her perspective.

In its smartest moments, Apple Cider Vinegar suggests that Belle is more a symptom of an already toxic system than of the disease itself. Milla — a young woman who feels disillusioned by doctors that treat her like a recalcitrant child, directing even conversations about her treatment to her father instead of her — finds false security in quacks selling enemas and juice cleanses. She earnestly encourages others to do the same, laying the groundwork for outright swindlers like Belle to take these ideas even further.

A credulous media enables them by eating up their lies and even rewarding them; at one point, Belle and Milla find themselves up for the same award celebrating “fun, fearless females” in business.

It’s enough to spark feelings of fury at the cruel opportunism of Belle’s grift, frustration at those who carelessly enabled these “wellness”-based lies, heartbreak for those who lost their money or their lives as a result. And it’s enough to make you wish the series had pushed harder on all those fronts, and less on the idea of Belle as a singular monster. Her story, in the end, turns out to be a familiar one. She’s just another opportunist tearing through a vulnerable community, and leaving destruction in her wake.