It turns out the moon isn’t made of cheese, Santa isn’t real and you can’t cure cancer by eating a special diet an influencer is hawking on Instagram.
But at the moment, there’s nothing to stop anyone with a social media following from claiming diet, juicing or miracle pills cured their cancer. And that’s exactly what happened with disgraced Australian influencer Belle Gibson, who faked brain cancer and then falsely claimed she was cured by a special diet that she happened to be selling.
It’s a despicable story that likely had real-life consequences: Gibson’s extremely popular “The Whole Pantry” app was part of the Apple Watch launch in 2015. If not for our collective desire for “scammer” stories (see Netflix’s “Inventing Anna”), it would seem almost too lurid to re-create the salacious tale for entertainment. But Netflix’s new six-episode limited series “Apple Cider Vinegar” (now streaming, ★★★ out of four) makes the story a vital and shockingly relatable cautionary tale about the dangers of “alternative medicine” and the experience of being a young woman navigating an uncaring health care system. With a quartet of superb actresses to tell the tale, led by Kaitlyn Dever as Belle, sharp scripts and a middle finger pointed at Belle and her ilk, “Vinegar” stumbles onto something very emotional and profound.
It’s unnecessary to know anything about Belle or the world of Australian “wellness” Instagrammers before watching “Vinegar,” although the stranger-than-fiction series will likely have you googling along the way. Told using an unnecessary time-hopping chronology, the series details Belle’s evolution from unhappy teen mother and telemarketer to rich “personality,” earned by fabricating a cancer diagnosis, understanding Instagram early and manipulating everyone in her life, in person or online.
Belle’s story is contrasted with that of Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), two women who do have cancer. Milla, young, willful and turned off by condescending doctors and what she sees as extreme treatment options, dives into alternative medicine like juicing and coffee enemas, convinced they will keep her cancer at bay. She blogs about it all along the way, making her a peer/enemy of Belle. Lucy accepts all the surgeries and chemotherapies her doctors suggest but is left feeling dehumanized and broken. The smaller chemo makes her feel, the more she’s drawn to Belle’s promise to diet your way out of cancer. But it’s Lucy’s husband Justin (Mark Coles Smith) who eventually exposes Belle’s fraud, with the help of the scammer’s former friend and manager Chanelle (Aisha Dee).
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Dever, long a shining star among her generation of actresses, does some of her most complex and compelling work in “Vinegar,” with an Australian accent that never wavers. She is more than matched by Debnam-Carey and Dee, each playing strong, forceful women without falling into tropes and stereotypes.
Beyond its strong performances, “Vinegar” excels in bringing to life many aspects of health care, and particularly women’s negative experiences, that aren’t often illustrated outside of knowing TikTok videos. Milla and Lucy are attracted to unproven “cures” and away from traditional medicine because of how they’re treated by doctors. It’s not just the fear of death and hope for a miracle; everyone has those emotions, no matter their gender or age. But there is a way young women are spoken to by some members of the medical establishment that ranges from patronizing and infantilizing to downright dismissive and dangerous. When Milla sits at a hospital conference table, surrounded mostly by older men, who tell her the only way to save her life is to cut off her arm and ‒ in her eyes, cut off her life ‒ you can feel their disdain for what they see as a silly, emotional little girl who doesn’t know any better. Compassion, understanding and respect are missing from the room.
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But “Vinegar” has no illusions about the effectiveness of the so-called cancer treatments Milla tries and Belle hawks. Milla, a composite character based on several alternative medicine advocates by series creator Samantha Strauss (“Nine Perfect Strangers”), isn’t cured by coffee enemas. What seems from the trailer like a kicky thriller uncovering a scammer is instead a deeply sorrowful tragedy about what happens when we disregard science.
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And in a world in which the nominee for this country’s secretary of Health and Human Services is hawking raw milk while the bird flu breaks out and the $6.3 trillion wellness industry pulls in a bigger market share than the pharmaceutical industry ($1.6 trillion), it’s important to remember that anyone offering a miracle cure is probably trying to cash in on our desperation and hope.
If it looks like snake oil, it probably is sold by snakes.
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