Lily Gladstone plays a cop investigating a case of bullying that escalated to murder in a compelling but overstuffed drama series.
When teenage boys commit murder, it's another news day. When teenage girls do it, everybody wants to know why. The 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk in Saanich, British Columbia — a suburb of quaint Victoria — shocked Canada and inspired literary works, sociological analyses and the acclaimed 2005 book Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk by late journalist and novelist Rebecca Godfrey.
Now that book has become a Hulu miniseries developed by Quinn Shephard (Not Okay) and starring Riley Keough as Godfrey and Lily Gladstone (Oscar nominee for Killers of the Flower Moon) as a fictional detective investigating the killing. With its provocative true subject, does "Under the Bridge" rise above the plentiful crop of streaming crime dramas?
The deal
Twentysomething journalist Rebecca returns from New York City to her Canadian hometown. She hopes to write about the troubled teens known locally as "Bic girls" — the implication being that they're disposable. At a group home, Rebecca befriends queen bee Josephine (Chloe Guidry), who idolizes the Notorious B.I.G. and John Gotti and has formed a gang she ambitiously names the Crip Mafia Cartel.
Among Josephine's followers was Reena (Vritika Gupta), a middle-class girl eager to rebel from her strict family of Indian Canadian Jehovah's Witnesses. Reena went missing after the two girls had a falling out, and rumors are flying about how Josephine and her friends ambushed her under the bridge.
Officer Cam Bentland (Gladstone), a friend from Rebecca's own teen years, takes the case more seriously than her colleagues. After Reena's body is found, and Josephine turns out to have an alibi, Cam seeks Rebecca's help in getting inside the insular group of teens to find out who took the bullying too far.
Will you like it?
In a 2019 interview with The Believer, Godfrey pinpointed the greatest difference between her book and what filmmakers hoped to make of it: "I hadn't written my experience into the story ... I didn't think my role as reporter was interesting or necessary." Yet Hollywood producers wanted to spotlight her role in shaping the narrative of Virk's murder, she said, creating something like "Capote [see sidebar] for girls."
Sure enough, the series' creators have restructured the story around Rebecca. Though Godfrey reportedly was involved in the adaptation, the choice to center her and the fictional Cam ends up being a drag on what is otherwise a fascinating — if scattered — study of teen angst and misbehavior.
The kids are by far the most compelling element of "Under the Bridge." Guidry is magnetic as Josephine, who loves to flaunt her lawlessness and toy with people but ultimately isn't as cold as she pretends. Javon "Wanna" Walton, as the baby-faced male suspect to whom Rebecca gets too attached, offers a heartbreaking combination of innocence and bitter experience. Aiyana Goodfellow, as another Josephine acolyte, convincingly portrays an awakening moral consciousness.
The victim is a full-fledged character, too. In flashbacks, Gupta makes us feel Reena's yearning for excitement and companionship, which is so intense that at one point she falsely accuses her loving father of sexual abuse so she can hang with Josephine at the group home.
The fourth episode takes us further back in time to explore the youth and marriage of Reena's parents, showing us the roots of their stern-yet-sympathetic attitudes. While this digression offers insights into the immigrant experience — with an unusual religious conversion twist — it loosens the series' overall focus.
The flashbacks don't end there, as we return to the '80s to explore the unresolved issues from Rebecca's own adolescence that the crime forces her to confront. In real life, Godfrey returned home specifically to write about Virk's murder, interviewing the teens in juvenile detention. In "Under the Bridge," she arrives well before any of them are in custody and plays a key role in sending them there — after much soul searching, acting out and moody writing sessions in her parents' palatial ocean-view home with a wineglass by her side. While the real Godfrey showed her thoughtfulness in interviews, simplistic characterization makes her screen avatar come across as impulsive and whiny.
"Under the Bridge" illustrates the dangers of giving every single character in a crime drama a traumatic backstory. (Even Cam, a font of common sense, has one.) While the series powerfully depicts the volatile friendships of teen girls, its creators try so hard to weave a rich context for the facts of the crime that they end up shortchanging them. Is this a mystery, a sociological study, a critique of journalism, a soap opera? As the narrative through line frays, we may lose interest in what actually happened under that bridge.
If you like this, try...
"True Detective: NIGHT country" (2024; Max): If you like watching pairs of grumpy women in northern climes solve murder cases that force them to revisit their personal demons, the fourth self-contained season of this vibes-driven show is a natural choice — with some of the same faults as "Under the Bridge."
Capote (2005; Peacock, Pluto TV, Prime, the Roku Channel, Tubi, rentable): Rebecca compares her entanglement with the murder suspects to Truman Capote's relationship with killer Perry Smith as he researched his true-crime landmark In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Capote here.
True Story (2015; Max, rentable): But Rebecca's character in "Under the Bridge" may actually have less in common with Capote than with the protagonist of this thought-provoking but frustrating fact-based film about a journalist (Jonah Hill) who got way too embroiled with an alleged killer (James Franco).
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Bio:
Margot Harrison is the Associate Editor at Seven Days; she coordinates literary and film coverage. In 2005, she won the John D. Donoghue award for arts criticism from the Vermont Press Association.
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