The sick games of a successful influencer

Suppose you come across someone who has exactly the same rotten disease as you. She knows how scary and lonely it is to hear in your twenties that you are in danger, how cold and technical doctors present you their possible remedies.

This woman – she feels like a girlfriend, although you have never met her; She sends your photos and videos, you know everything about her life – that hell has come over. She shines, she is very healthy. She managed to do that by not listening to the white coats; They don’t understand anything, they don’t know what you know about your body. Your body is yours. You determine.

Wellness influencers are omnipresent on social media, and that is not surprising: there is an enormous variety of complaints between nuclear healthy and hospital-sick frozen shoulderwhat doctors only have a limited influence on. Even with more serious ailments, it remains attractive to look for a solution themselves, especially for women, who are still not always well understood in the consultation room. And besides: doctors only speak for a short time, the phone is always there. If you are sick, it is sometimes your only company.

In Apple Cider Vinegaran excellent new Netflix series from Australia, four young women are followed who all fall under the spell of the Health Influencer-hype, who got a huge boost thanks to Instagram more than ten years ago. Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) has cancer and thus becomes depressed from the chemotherapy that she would prefer to stop. Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey) refuses against explicit doctor’s advice to have her arm with tumors amputated; She swears by coffee floods and fruit juices and earns so much money as an influencer in a short time that her disturbing father can only be impressed. Milla’s childhood friend Chanelle (Aisha Dee) helps her to further expand her brand, full of admiration, but also slightly worried. Could it be real, a cancer patient who heals himself?

Hearts and flowers

Then a new competitor is present in this women’s universe full of hearts and flowers and ‘pure’ food: teenage mother Belle Gibson, played by Kaitlyn Dever (from the US, but with a flawless Australian accent) and inspired by a real existing woman. Gibson looks a lot like peelor ​​Anna Sorokin, who dragged tons of the New York elite as a Russian immigrant by acting as a rich heirs, a scandal that was filmed loosely in the Netflix series Inventing Anna. Belle Gibson entered even more dangerous territory: her entire success as an influencer was based on medical deception. The brain tumor from which she claimed to have been cure with her own healthy recipes was a fabrication.

Gibson was exposed in 2015 thanks to the detective work of two journalists from the Sydney Morning Heraldwho in 2017 the book The Woman Who Fooled the World about the case published. Screenwriter Samantha Strauss wrote a very exciting script around it, a ‘Tru-Sceh-Story Based On A Lie“As a viewer you know from the first episode that you are dealing with a pathological liar, but nevertheless your Belle’s world will be sucked into. How does she do it, and above all, why?

At first glance, Belle is primarily an annoying character, nagging and sucking. She conjures up tears whether it is nothing and pinks people in a malicious way; her partner Clive (Ashley Zukerman, he also had a nice supporting role Succession) changes through her refined mental games of a good -in -love in an accomplice. PR assistant Chanelle walks from her old girlfriend Milla to Belle.

Magnetic fields

All doors open for Belle: there will be an app, there will be a cookbook. You see it all nail biting, while Lucy and Milla are getting sicker. In the background, quacks of an older generation pass by, including one ‘Dr. Phill ‘-A chance or accidental wink to TV therapist Phil McGraw-who convinces Belle after a measurement of her magnetic fields that she has’ DNA damage to her liver’ and will therefore suffer a lot of pain.

Belle agrees, because that is the crux: she hurts. From childhood on, she has been struggling with rejection and exclusion, and clamps to her imagined ailments because otherwise everyone will ignore her again. Doctor Phill flawlessly points her to her greatest sorrow – the bad relationship with her son, who feels that her attention is elsewhere – to then sell her a remarkable device of ten thousand dollars to cure at home. And Belle goes for the ax. She is just as desperate as her followers.

The great strength of Apple Cider Vinegar Is that scenarist Strauss really makes an effort to understand the motives of her characters. Online quackery with facts with facts is not enough, even if it is important work; The Dutchman Adriaan ter Braack (Shamadriaan on Instagram) and YouTuber Doctor Mike from the US are worth following, even if you think you are immune to all that nonsense. The title of the series is significant in this context: your reviewer also drank apple cider vinegar on the sober stomach for a while because of the alleged beneficial effect on the intestinal flora. Belle Gibson clocks a bottle of road. I mainly remember how dirty I found that one sip.

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