Under the Bridge review – Lily Gladstone leads respectful yet bland true crime drama
As a true crime drama in the year 2024, Hulu’s Under the Bridge at least knows the giant potholes of the genre to avoid. The eight-episode limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough, an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book on a sensational murder in Canada, knows not to glorify law enforcement as hyper-competent, or to privilege perpetrators’ emotional lives over a faceless victim’s, or to depict gratuitous violence. “I think people should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them,” Keough, as Godfrey, tells the parents of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl horrifically beaten to death and drowned by both strangers and her so-called friends. As an exercise in how to make entertainment out of a real crime with real perpetrators and victims – particularly Virk, ably embodied by Vritika Gupta – Under the Bridge is self-aware and empathetic, clearly thinking through implications, its heart in the right place.
Unfortunately, as a television show, it often has the feeling of flat cola – tepid, stale and reminiscent of something buzzier and brighter. Though it assiduously dodges some of the worst of the so-called “dead girl” tropes, it falls prey to the most irksome ones of prestige streaming TV: bloated episode counts, multiple timelines, blurry formal shifts, portentous voiceovers, mistaking correct politics (on racism, incompetent law enforcement, trauma and more) for nuanced, compelling craft.
Though the crime itself is almost too awful to believe, there’s little to distinguish Under the Bridge, developed by the late Godfrey and Quinn Shephard, from other recent, better true-crime dramas such as Under the Banner of Heaven, The Staircase, The Act or The Girl from Plainville, nor from shows unraveling stomach-churning dead-girl crimes such as True Detective or Mare of Easttown. The series most overtly recalls the superlative Sharp Objects, HBO’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel, in that it also revolves around an unscrupulous, capital-T Troubled journalist returning to investigate the shocking murder of a teenage girl in her small home town, after escaping the tragic death of a sibling. But whereas Amy Adams’ clichedto-hell unethical journalist was at least compelling, and the late Jean-Marc Vallée’s vision of midwestern Gothic hypnotic, Under the Bridge runs cold, even as it tries to capture the inexplicably white-hot rage of teenage girls (and one ill-placed, murderously angry teenage boy, played by Euphoria’s Javon Walton) on a small island in British Columbia in 1997.
The leaders of those girls are indeed terrifying – Josephine Brooks (Chloe Guidry) the alpha dog prone to bite swift and hard, Kelly Ellard (Izzy G) the chilling, lethal beta predator. The girls were self-styled “gangstas” who idolized John Gotti and fetishized mob violence; they practiced their cruelty on Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow), a Black fellow resident at Josephine’s group home, and particularly on Reena, a shy and yearning outcast desperate for friends,