on Netflix<\/a>, is the latest scammer docudrama, another galling true story zhuzhed up for maximum bingeyness. This one is about two scams, though: an Australian woman perpetrating a cancer fraud, and the wellness industry more broadly.<\/p>\nKaitlyn Dever stars as Belle Gibson, who rose to fame as a cancer and food blogger. The show weaves her story together with that of two other characters who actually do have cancer: Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Belle\u2019s blogger idol, who is convinced she can heal her own cancer, and later her mother\u2019s, with juicing, and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), a breast-cancer patient desperate for alternatives to the brutality of chemotherapy. Presumably \u201cCoffee Enema\u201d was not as enticing a title as \u201cApple Cider Vinegar,\u201d but that pseudoscientific practice occupies a lot screen time here. A lot.<\/p>\n
The story unfolds in jumbled timelines, mostly between 2009 and 2015. The size and gnarliness of the lesions on Milla\u2019s arms situate where she is in her prognosis, and Lucy grows increasingly wan. Belle\u2019s \u201cjourney,\u201d in contrast, is told by the state of her veneers \u2014 the brighter and shinier, the more recent. Belle\u2019s grifts began in her teens, but she started honing her cancer story on mommy message boards as a young mother. \u201cOne of the worst things that can happen to a person happened to me!\u201d she declares, lapping up each molecule of pity she can wring from others.<\/p>\n
\u201cVinegar\u201d has more depth and bite than many other scam stories, with more hypotheses about what might motivate someone to perpetrate social frauds: bad mom, absent dad, rapacious need for attention \u2014 the same things that lead a lot of people to a life on the stage. Alienation and desperation are powerful motivators, and Devers\u2019s performance makes Belle just sympathetic enough to reel you in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n