Fiction undermines based-on-true-events miniseries
“Under the Bridge” is an eight-part Hulu miniseries based on the book of the same name by Rebecca Godfrey, about the 1997 murder of a teenage girl by fellow teenagers in a small Canadian town.
The series casts a wide net, showing the crime, the events leading up to the crime, and the subsequent investigations and trials.
It’s an entertaining series, well-cast and well-acted, and featuring what is, at its core, a compelling story. However, two flaws keep it from being a complete success.
The first is some of the later episodes seem like a willful attempt to stretch the running time until it snaps. There are not only flashbacks but flashbacks within flashbacks. The series even takes time to tell the story of the courtship of the murdered girl’s parents in the 1970s, as well as episodes from Godfrey’s childhood in the 1980s. We neither need to know this information nor are we interested.
The series’ second flaw has simply to do with the frustration that often comes when watching something we know is only partly true.
Lily Gladstone is lovely here as the sensitive policewoman on the case, one who has a whole backstory as an Indigenous person adopted as a baby by a white family. But the policewoman is a fictitious character, so it’s a little difficult to get worked up about her feelings for Rebecca (Riley Keough), with whom she is supposed to have had some personal history.
It seems to me that the rule for adapting a real-life story is that one should have total license to invent when the actual details are unavailable. For example, if two people had a conversation,
but you don’t know what they said, you can make up what you think they might have said.
But you shouldn’t invent major characters and events that didn’t happen and have them interact
and mingle with true events and real people. To do that undermines whatever cautionary value “Under the Bridge” might have had as a story about bullying and turns it into a mere entertainment based on other people’s pain and suffering.
Aside from those caveats, “Under the Bridge” is a superior mini-series, with lots of interesting characters and situations.
In the opening episodes, the future victim, Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta), falls in with a dangerous group of girls, led by Josephine (Chloe Guidry), who aspires to be more than a mean girl. An aficionado of Mafia movies, her dream is to move to New York and work for the charismatic mob boss John Gotti.
Meanwhile, as Rebecca Godfrey, a writer who comes home in search of her next book, Keough suggests a complicated and contradictory personality — someone poised but with a screw loose, someone grounded and observant but also reckless. The performance is an arresting tribute to the author, who died in 2022 at the age of 54.
Still, the girls are the ones that most grab your attention. Guidry is a study in oblivious menace, dominating every scene she’s in. Her flashiness is nicely balanced by Izzy G. who, as Kelly Eldard, brings out a less flashy but equally unsettling variety of cruelty — calm, implacable and weirdly self-satisfied.
The first two episodes are the best, but every episode has its merits. “Under the Bridge” could have been a great six-episode series. As it stands, it’s a good eight-episode series.