‘Under the Bridge’ debuts on Hulu
Monsters are scary. But they have nothing on mean girls. This is the theme of “Under the Bridge,” a new limited series streaming on Hulu.
Based on a true-crime book by Rebecca Godfrey, it looks into the murder of Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) in 1997 in Victoria, a bucolic seaside town in Canada’s British Columbia. Estranged from her devout Christian family of East Indian immigrants, 14-year-old Reena is an outsider on many levels. Her uncle tries to mediate between her and her churchy mother and buys her hip hop CDs so she can “fit in.”
Unfortunately, Reena chose the wrong crowd to approach. Desperate to belong, she tried to insinuate herself with a gaggle of tough girls who lived at a halfway house for young women whose parents had problems, addictions and jail terms of their own. Josephine (Chloe Guidry) was the self-appointed leader of this angry pack.
Attractive and not unintelligent in a feral, streetsmart way, she styled herself on New York mobster John Gotti and on the gangster rap sound that was popular at the time.
Reena’s encounter with this self-styled gang coincides with the return to Victoria of writer Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough). Ten years removed from her hometown and thoroughly accustomed to New York’s harder edge, she thinks the lost girls of Victoria might be a great subject for a journalistic deep dive. She has no idea.
Her return also involves her encounter with Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone, “Killers of the Flower Moon”), an ambitious young police officer and an Indigenous woman adopted by a white police veteran. Rebecca and Cam share a past and knowledge of what it’s like to be lost and troubled.
Reena’s disappearance offers Cam a chance to stand out, a move resented by the tight-knit fraternity of white male officers that surrounds her. Their indifference to a missing teen, particularly an immigrant, underscores why one teen refers to her crowd as the Bics, the cigarette lighters designed to be completely disposable.
The awkward collaboration between female frenemies, one white and one Indigenous, may remind some viewers of the recent “True Detective: Night Country.” And the slow-burn aspects of the case recall any number of true-crime docuseries. The tone of “Under the Bridge” may remind some of why viewers tend to prefer the nonfiction approach.
“Bridge” blends Rebecca’s ponderous
voice-over reflections about the mythic nature of murder and fear with scenes of relentlessly sullen and surly characters. While Cam shows a spark of curiosity and empathy, everybody else is caught up in their own “drama.” It’s understandable in the damaged teens, but coming from the relatively privileged Rebecca, it can seem like a dreary pose — one she should have outgrown around the time she left Victoria.