Apple Cider Vinegar (Netflix)
Apple Cider Vinegar concerns a real life, deeply obnoxious, insecure person; so insecure in fact that they lie about having brain cancer to gain popularity, build an online health advice empire, manipulate everyone they come across in life for their gain and reap every penny they can out of it. Belle Gibson is a character that is incredibly easy to hate, and the show does not dissuade our disgust towards her actions. Rather, it somehow drills enough under her skin that maybe we feel we can understand her. It does not ask for our empathy, but by diving into the life of someone so fake, it cuts through her lies to tell us the truth about her personality.
She is a woman whose compulsive, crippling need for attention is enabled by the arrival of social media proper at the start of the 2010s, a space where anyone can manipulate any story they tell into truth. It would be less likely to work without the ever fantastic Kaitlyn Dever who has continually impressed since her big arrival on the scene in Booksmart. Any moment she is on screen as Belle, her eyes tell a truth that her actions and words do not. She delivers a performance that subtly but powerfully draws attention to the fact that Belle herself is always putting on a performance. Her eyes appear to be performing separately from the rest of her body so as to tell us the truth and the lies simultaneously.
The show smartly takes in the impact of these lies in two other narrative strands. Firstly, the struggles of another online health guru who actually fights with cancer as she tries to build her own business. Secondly, those of a journalist and his cancer-fighting wife and how their disagreements over Belle’s online presence split them apart, driving him to pursue a story that will tear Belle down. The show jumps across time rather intensely to take in all these interweaving stories across roughly five years, and the first half struggles to give each story enough breathing space due to how quickly it moves between them.
However, it is in the second half when the events and characters of each strand start to link together more closely that the show hits its stride. As the toll of Belle’s lies really start to have tangibly-felt consequences, an engaging momentum builds as we hurtle towards the inevitable disintegration of her world. The show also frequently employs VFX to place Belle’s online world in her physical environment. This device feels a little overused, but effectively summarises how her head is forever stuck inside her phone, as she near totally neglects her duties towards her partner and son, both clearly struggling with how little she seems to care about them.
Even if at times the show can be a little overbearing stylistically, this effect is intentional, making the obnoxiousness of people like Belle (who now litter social media) absolutely evident. Its finale glosses over a lot of details rather quickly, but this tidiness is exactly what makes seeing the comeuppance of a woman this detestable so satisfying.
