Is ‘Heal’ for Real? Everything You Need to Know about Kelly Noonan Gores

Another month, another crop of content dropped on Netflix for subscribers to discover. February 2019 added the alternative medicine documentary Heal to Netflix’s lineup, and now people are slowly discovering it. But as with any doc (and most of the things added to Netflix outta the blue), you probably have a lot of questions about Heal. Here are some answers!

Who is Kelly Noonan Gores?

Kelly Noonan Gores is not only the face of the documentary, she’s also the director, executive producer, and writer. Heal represents the melding of two worlds she’s been part of for the last 15 years: filmmaking, yoga, meditation, and other spiritual pursuits. She founded Elevative Entertainment in 2012 to produce projects, which include the Taken parody Tooken, a thriller titled Beneath, and Heal.

Nonan Gores is also married to Alec Gores, a businessman and founder of the private equity firm The Gores Group. His net worth is around $2.2 billion dollars. That’s probably how John Legend performed at Kelly and Alec’s wedding in 2016.

Is Heal a Netflix original documentary?

It is not. It was produced by Noonan Gores’ production company Elevative Entertainment, which she founded in 2012. Heal was originally released in 2017 under The Orchard, which is owned by Sony. It was added to Netflix on February 1.

What are the reviews for Heal?

Heal’s Rotten Tomatoes page does not yet have enough reviews to give it a rating. However of the three reviews logged, two of them are rotten.

John DeFore of the Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Glossy alt-medicine doc will play well with the already convinced, but isn’t as persuasive as some similar efforts.”

Kimber Myers of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “It’s a well-intentioned film that wants to help people live healthier lives, but it sometimes appears closer to a feature-length infomercial than a legitimate documentary.”

On the fresh side, Alex Arabian of Film Inquiry wrote: “Heal is a documentary for everyone, whether one considers themselves an optimist, pessimist, believer in a higher power, atheist, or otherwise.”

Is Heal for real?

Well, this is a loaded question, isn’t it? Look: this is a documentary made by someone who believes in faith healing with people who practice faith healing and people who believe they were saved by faith healing. This is a documentary about being skeptical of Western medicine that is not at all skeptical about Eastern medicine.

So if you’re going to watch Heal, you have to approach the documentary with skepticism. You have to pay attention to the way the doc flip flops, like how it starts with Noonan Gore incredulously asking if we’re supposed to think that our food is partly to blame for declining health.

“I feel like it’s changed from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to the one degree of cancer,” says Noonan Gore. “I mean, has our world and food become so toxic that illness is inevitable?” In the world of Heal, stress and bad energy is what gives you cancer or heart disease. And then halfway through the documentary, after talking head after talking head goes on about spirits and using wishes to fix a spine, an entire segment is dedicated to the healing power of… eating well. Huh.

It’s also helpful to Google everyone that appears in the documentary, like, for instance, author and international speaker Anita Moorjani. She claims that her lymphoma had left her body riddled with tumors as her organs started to fail. She went into a coma, where she traveled to a realm and discovered that the cause of her cancer was residual negative feelings she had towards her dead father. After she made peace with her father, she woke up and the cancer went away. Wow!

Except, and Heal neglects to mention this, Moorjani also had her lungs drained and began chemotherapy, treatment she’d resisted for over three years.

There’s one moment in the documentary that really demonstrates why you have to remain skeptical. Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center who did not go to medical school, equates a patient listening to a doctor to a patient becoming a victim again. They became a victim of the sickness, and now they’re a victim of an authority figure telling them what to do with their body. But. Isn’t that what every single talking head in Heal is asking people to do? These people, from Joe Dispenza to Kelly Brogan and Anthony William, are all claiming to be authorities–but doesn’t listening to authorities makes you a victim?

If you’re going to be a victim either way, why not listen to the actual medical professionals that have studied the human body, medicine, and science? Or if you prefer, you can to listen to someone who believes that when he was four years old, a voice he calls Spirit compelled him to walk over to his grandmother and diagnose her with lung cancer. Anthony William is now the Medical Medium, author of multiple books and a website with a robust Amazon store. When I was four, I believed that Darth Vader was going to chop me in half while I cowered in bed, but I’m not a practicing Jedi today.

It’s also worth pointing out that the people slamming pharmaceutical companies for profiting off medicine are themselves profiting off of countless books, sessions, and seminars. Coincidentally, if you enjoy Heal, there’s a Heal summit you can sign up for online.

Okay, one last question: Does Heal feature insight from a practicing wizard?

You bet it does.

Stream Heal on Netflix