All sensational murder cases will someday be turned into a television series. This week, the death of Reena Virk—just 14 years old when she was killed in British Columbia in 1997—is getting that treatment in Hulu’s Under the Bridge, an adaptation of the late Rebecca Godfrey’s book. Many of the familiar trappings of this sodden genre are there: a dreary town, the criss-cross stitching of timelines. Under the Bridge is, in look and affect, barely distinguishable from other series that have waded into similar narrative waters.
But Under the Bridge, adapted for television by Quinn Shephard, works admirably hard to differentiate itself. It is both solemn and furious about its story: Virk was bullied for her appearance and her Indian heritage before she was viciously beaten by a group of her classmates and then killed by two of them. It was a terrible crime that became sensationalized, nationwide news in Canada. Shephard gestures toward all that media frenzy, but otherwise keeps her gaze tightly focused on the sad and frightening complexities of the case.
Godfrey is herself a character, played by Riley Keough as a sharp and inquisitive writer who perhaps gets too close to her subjects. She is laden with guilt over the past death of her brother, and among these broken kids she finds one she can maybe rescue. Lily Gladstone plays Cam, an old friend and former flame of Godfrey’s now working as a police officer under her father’s command. Cam is First Nations but was adopted into a white family; she is thus particularly sensitive to the ways Reena was ostracized by her mostly white peers.
Under the Bridge is about a social injustice in a time before teenagers were so steeped in that language. These kids dwell in the liminal moment just before cell phones and the internet, instead taking their cues mostly from music; the friend group to which Reena (played by Vritika Gupta) desperately wants to belong loves gangster rap in particular. These girls, barred from their male peers’ homosocial tribes, have formed what they call a gang, the Crip Mafia Cartel. They are, from a distance, the embodiment of reactionary fears about youth corrupted by modern media.
But Shephard, ever diligent, keeps pushing in to show us a group of sympathetically troubled and misguided kids, only one of whom might be beyond help. Josephine (Chloe Guidry) is the scary ringleader of the group, a child of the foster system whose relatively independent life at a sort of halfway house is foolishly envied by Reena. Dusty (a powerful, pitiable Aiyana Goodfellow), who also lives at the home, mostly does what she’s told, her passivity perhaps a kind of atonement for a violent past. Kelly (Izzy G) is another matter, perhaps the lone sociopath of the group—or, at least, she’s portrayed that way in the show’s rather harsh telling.
As the show toggles between the times before and after Reena’s death, Shephard gently explores the conflicted dimensions of each character, trying to suss out something like motivation. It’s a boggling crime that perhaps has no explanation beyond the confused frenzy of adolescence. The show most poignantly seeks to understand Warren (the remarkable Javon Walton), the one boy involved in the crime, for whom Godfrey develops a particular interest—an affection, even. She sees in him both the brother she lost and the senselessness of this whole tragic thing. The broader show is harsher in its inquest than Godfrey—Shephard calmly insists that Warren, like the others, allowed their prejudices to dehumanize Reena—but it nonetheless shares much of her empathy.