Apple Cider Vinegar knows exactly what it is

The first thing Apple Cider Vinegar does is tell you, more or less, not to trust it. Each episode opens with a wink at its own genre, a note that this is a true story based on a lie, and Kaitlyn Dever’s Belle Gibson turns to the camera early on to remind you that none of these people have agreed to be here and you are watching anyway. It is the kind of move that can curdle into smugness in about four seconds. Somehow it does not. The six-part series, created by Samantha Strauss and made in Melbourne for Netflix, has figured out the one thing most true-crime drama refuses to admit, which is that the dramatisation is part of the same economy as the crime.

If you have somehow missed the Belle Gibson saga (lucky you, honestly), the short version is this. Gibson was a Melbourne wellness influencer who claimed she had cured her own terminal brain cancer through diet and alternative medicine, built an app called The Whole Pantry and a cookbook deal on the back of the story, promised to donate large sums to charity, and turned out to have neither the cancer nor, in any meaningful amount, the donations. She was exposed in 2015 by two journalists at The Age, Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, whose book the series adapts. A federal court later fined her hundreds of thousands of dollars, which she has reportedly never paid.

The Dever of it all

Let me say the obvious thing first: Kaitlyn Dever is very good, and the casting of an American to play one of the most Australian grifts imaginable should not work and does. Her accent holds (a low bar that many have failed, so credit where due), but more importantly she resists the trap of playing Gibson as a cartoon. The performance is built on the thing that makes real con artists frightening, which is that they appear to believe it while they are saying it. Dever lets you watch Gibson construct each lie in the half-second before she tells it, and then inhabit it completely. To its credit, the show is not interested in the comfortable question of whether Gibson is evil. It is interested in the more uncomfortable one of how much she had convinced herself.

The series widens out from Gibson smartly. Alycia Debnam-Carey plays Milla Blake, a second wellness figure widely taken to be modelled on the late Jessica Ainscough, the so-called Wellness Warrior who refused conventional treatment for a real cancer and died. This is the show’s sharpest and most painful decision, because it draws the line between the fraud who was never sick and the true believer who was, and it refuses to let you file them in the same drawer. Gibson is a liar. Milla is a tragedy. The wellness industry monetised both, and the show keeps your sympathies moving in a way that a straight Gibson takedown never could.

Where it wobbles

It is not flawless. Six episodes is the right length and the middle two still bag a little, in the way that nearly every Australian limited series sags right where the streamer’s algorithm presumably told everyone to keep watching. There is a subplot or two that exists mainly to give the supporting cast something to do (Aisha Dee and Ashley Zukerman are both better than the material occasionally asks of them). And the fourth-wall stuff, the device I praised up top, does get rationed a bit too carefully, so that it shows up when the writers want a jolt and vanishes when the plot needs to behave. A braver show would have committed to it all the way through.

But these are quibbles about a series that mostly knows what it is doing, and what it is doing is unusual. Most dramatisations of scammers, and there are now approximately nine hundred of them, want to have it both ways: tut at the fraud while serving up the fraud as entertainment. Apple Cider Vinegar is queasily aware that by existing it is doing the thing Gibson always wanted, which is to make her lie the centre of attention again, this time with a star attached and a streaming budget behind it. The show cannot resolve that contradiction. Its honesty is in refusing to pretend the contradiction is not there.

The actual subject

Hand on heart, the most interesting thing about the series is not Gibson at all. It is us. The wellness economy did not work because one woman was a good liar. It worked because a very large number of people wanted, badly, to believe that cancer could be beaten with kale and intention, that the medical establishment was hiding the real cure, that wellness was a thing you could purchase and post about. Gibson sold a story the audience had already decided it wanted. Apple Cider Vinegar is smart enough to know that the same appetite is what brought you to the show, and brave enough, mostly, to make you feel slightly implicated for being there.

It is the rare true-crime drama that ends with the uncomfortable suspicion that the joke is on the viewer. Belle Gibson built a career on telling people what they wanted to hear. So, the show quietly points out, did Netflix when it greenlit this. That it lands the point without quite letting itself off the hook is the most Australian thing about it.