Streaming

Deception and delusion collide in Netflix’s take-down of wellness scammer Belle Gibson

February 3, 2025

This week’s streaming picks include Netflix’s drama about wellness scammer Belle Gibson, Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult face-off in Justin Kurzel’s terror drama, Sherlock’s sidekick gets his own show and a compelling British drama takes on a Heathrow robbery.

Apple Cider Vinegar ★★★

Deception and delusion are intertwined in this densely charged Australian drama built on the real-life story of disgraced scammer Belle Gibson, whose wellness empire collapsed in 2015 after false claims of surviving multiple cancer diagnoses were exposed alongside financial improprieties. What characters know to be false and what they believe to be true keep overlapping, making for a punishingly expansive story. Even when contradictory, there are impressive elements here, but I’m not sure they combine for a story that’s illuminating. Fittingly, you just survive Apple Cider Vinegar.

With her Australian accent locked down, the American actor Kaitlyn Dever (Unbelievable) gives a full-throated performance as Gibson, a fabulist whose setbacks in life elicited ever more grandiose claims of life-threatening illness. She is a grifter, a ghoul. But in a story whose chronology relentlessly jumps back and forth, that’s not enough. To fully appreciate her failings, creator Samantha Strauss (The End) has fleshed out a fictionalised Gibson. She’s empathetically rounded out so her failings, which steadily escalate, have a human foundation.

There are numerous creations added in a six-part limited series “inspired” by The Woman Who Fooled the World, the 2017 book by The Age journalists Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, who exposed Gibson. There’s a like-and-share friendship turned rivalry between Gibson and successful wellness blogger Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who really does have cancer and becomes committed to the alternative treatments she believed cured it. Blake’s friend, Chanelle (Aisha Dee), becomes Gibson’s manager and then a source for the fictionalised Age journalists.

Ashley Zukerman gives a fine performance as Clive, Belle Gibson’s husband, in Apple Cider Vinegar.Credit: Netflix

Blake’s journey is the show’s most potent storyline: her beliefs become a form of fundamentalism, ultimately impacting her health and that of others. The multiple narratives, which are presented with a bubbly, seductive visual energy by director Jeffrey Walker to match the gleaming facades of online culture, paint the wellness industry as a form of radical self-belief undercut by pseudo-science shonks and rip-off artists. The noble health scams are sickening.

There’s a surplus of fine performances, starting with Essie Davis as Gibson’s mother, who sees through her claims because she models them herself, and Ashley Zukerman as Clive Rothwell, Gibson’s increasingly guilt-ridden partner. But there’s one storyline too many: the marginalised struggles of Age journalist Justin Guthrie (Mark Coles Smith) and his wife, Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who also has breast cancer. Along the way there are dings for the cookbook-industrial complex, but the finale and its fantastical flourishes fall short. You’re left with the undeniable: Belle Gibson didn’t have cancer; Belle Gibson was a cancer. Netflix

THE ORDER ★★★½

Jude Law and Jurnee Smollett play FBI agents hunting down a white nationalist group in The Order.

I say this as a compliment: Jude Law is giving off immaculate Gene Hackman vibes in this lean crime film. Law, whose immense beauty was incorrectly weaponised by Hollywood 20 years ago, is flourishing in his character actor era. Here he plays a weary FBI agent, Terry Husk, who is so burnt out – Husk by name, husk by nature – that he takes a job in rural Idaho, hoping for a quiet life and a chance to reconnect with his estranged family. Directed with sharp purposefulness by the Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel (Snowtown), The Order is based on real events in 1983. Husk arrives just as a splinter white nationalist group, led by the menacingly charismatic Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult), is graduating from robbing banks and recruitment to assassinations and terrorist acts. The story shows the cell’s zealotry and their hypocrisies, adding a pungent sense of place. It’s an observant movie.

Nicholas Hoult plays the menacingly charismatic Bob Matthews in The Order.

Nothing is overplayed, whether it’s the scenes of Husk stewing at his desk, bottle at hand, or the panoramic landscape that Kurzel and Australian cinematographer Adam Arkapaw contrast with the cell’s cloistered malignancy. The film has a gnarled momentum and as a period piece, it’s telling. A veteran white separatist counsels Matthews that armed revolution isn’t the way. “In 10 years we’ll have members in the Congress,” he says. Amazon Prime Video

MYTHIC QUEST (season 4)

Charlotte Nicdao and Rob McElhenney keep it platonic in Mythic Quest.

Given its welter of heavyweight hour-long dramas, this consistently droll workplace comedy remains a welcome part of the Apple TV+ roster. Set at the chaotic and commerce-driven studio of a video game developer with a major online hit, Mythic Quest continues to tie together office satire and personal need – the characters still feel like they make sense as imperfect people, not a convenient piece in an episode’s outline. The show’s best decision: keeping the dynamic between co-creator Rob McElhenney’s Ian and Charlotte Nicdao’s Poppy platonic. They’re a livelier fulcrum without romantic tension. Apple TV+

YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD SPIDER-MAN

Hudsom Thames voices Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.

This animated series about Peter Parker’s metamorphosis into Spider-Man has no interest in the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe, canonical events, or character crossovers. It’s happy to be low-key entertaining instead of exhausting. Voiced by Hudson Thames, this Peter Parker is a 15-year-old high school student from Queens who is trying to figure out how to put his accidentally acquired superpowers to good use. It’s a tricky transition. The 3-D animation nods to classic comic-book panels, while the suddenly everywhere Colman Domingo (The Madness) hits all the right marks as Peter’s unlikely mentor, Norman Osborn. Disney+

WATSON

There are too many pieces being jammed into this case-of-the-week medical drama, which is set in the present day but spun off from Sherlock Holmes lore. After the death of the master detective, this Dr John Watson (Morris Chestnut) finds himself in charge of a Pittsburgh medical clinic where the mysteries presented relate to seemingly impenetrable ailments. As a more disciplined House, he has a team of gifted young doctors to marshal, although finding the remedy often involves a degree of detective work that draws on Watson’s former gig. Paramount+

THE GOLD

Stan has just acquired this compelling British crime drama, which was on my top 10 list in 2023. Written with canny insight by Neil Forsyth (Guilt), it uses the headline-making, real-life armed robbery of three tonnes of gold bullion from a secure warehouse near Heathrow Airport in 1983 as the jumping off point for a study of institutional corruption, defiant social ambition, and heartbreaking failure. With exemplary performances from Hugh Bonneville, Jack Lowden, and Dominic Cooper it’s a thrilling yet melancholic narrative – no one who comes near the gleaming loot gets away clean. Stan*

Stan is owned by Nine, the published of this masthead.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

License this article

NewsBite