Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough Embrace True Crime's Moral Complexities in Under the Bridge

It's been nearly 30 years since the murder of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl of South Asian descent beaten and killed by a group of teenagers in Saanich, British Columbia, and certain questions about the case remain unanswered. To what degree did Virk's race play a role in the brutal murder? Why did Warren Glowatski get involved in the initial conflict between Virk and the group of girls she believed to be her friends? Which of Virk's injuries can be attributed to Glowatski, and which were caused by Kelly Ellard, who admitted to rolling Virk's semi-conscious body into the water on the night of November 14, 1997?

These unresolved details drove the media's interest in the murder at the time, triggering a moral panic about teenage bullying and violence. Now, decades later, they've become a guiding light for Under the Bridge, Hulu's adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey's 2005 book about Virk's murder. Created by Quinn Shephard, who collaborated extensively with Godfrey before the author's death in 2022, the limited series seeks not to fill in the gaps, but to interrogate the messy realities at the heart of the case, a goal that sets it apart from other true-crime docudramas that opt for more straightforward retellings.

That's not to say Under the Bridge eschews all genre conventions. The eight-episode series is told primarily in two timelines, one set in the months leading up to the murder, and another in its aftermath. The former introduces viewers to Reena (Vritika Gupta), a teenage girl desperate to fit in with her peers in the predominantly white town of Saanich. As the child of Indian immigrants, Reena is a frequent target of bullies at school, but when she befriends Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry), the mafia-obsessed queen bee of foster home Seven Oaks, she thinks she's finally found her community. As she becomes more enmeshed in Jo's "gang" — dubbed "CMC," or the "Crip Mafia Cartel" — Reena begins acting out, both in an attempt to impress her new friends and as a rebellion against her strict parents, Manjit (Ezra Farouke Khan) and Suman (Archie Panjabi), who are devout Jehovah's Witnesses.

For any docudrama that seeks to honor the victims or shed light on their frame of mind, flashbacks like these are essential; obviously, if Under the Bridge were to take place entirely in the weeks and months following the murder, Reena would remain unknowable, a ghostly presence casting a shadow over the show but never materializing in a meaningful way. But Shephard and showrunner Samir Mehta go one step further, using these flashbacks to explore not just Reena's overwhelming sense of loneliness (which manifests in a heartbreaking turn of events halfway through the season), but the power dynamic among the girls. While Jo couches her feelings of abandonment in threats of physical violence and sworn blood oaths, Kelly (Izzy G), who lives with her wealthy family across town, emerges as her devoted underboss, willing to do whatever it takes to uphold CMC's culture of "omerta."

This group of young actors — which includes Aiyana Goodfellow as Dusty Pace, the member of the crew closest with Reena — effectively capture the twin forces of volatility and vulnerability at play in Reena's murder, but it's Guidry and Izzy G who most command the screen. Their standout performances are reminiscent of Eliza Scanlen's turn in Sharp Objects, with each delivering a chilling portrait of girls driven by impulses equal parts relatable and twisted.

The question of how much we should sympathize with the perpetrators of this horrific crime comes into greater focus in the post-murder timeline. After a decade away, Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough) returns home to write a book about the "BIC girls" of Victoria — girls like Jo and Dusty, whom the police consider as "disposable" as lighters. Jo is instantly drawn to Rebecca and her New York cool, so much so that when Rebecca begins asking about her "missing" friend Reena, whose body has yet to be discovered, Jo brags about putting a cigarette out between Reena's eyes to "teach her a lesson" about her place in the CMC hierarchy.

Jo's disturbing recollection of the beating under the bridge sends Rebecca running to her childhood friend Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone), the lead detective on the case. Cam and Rebecca have history — their relationship is tied to the sudden death of Rebecca's brother Gabe, which plays a key role in later episodes — so trust doesn't come easy, but they quickly come to see the benefits of their unconventional partnership. While Rebecca pumps the girls for information and develops a bond with Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton), Cam works the case from within the system, methodically collecting hard evidence that implicates the teens in Reena's death.

Keough and Gladstone, both coming off critically acclaimed performances in Daisy Jones & the Six and Killers of the Flower Moon, respectively, have no problem selling Rebecca and Cam's chemistry, but they're even better when their characters are at odds. In the second half of the season, their relationship crumbles as Rebecca becomes inappropriately close to the teens and loses sight of the victim she claims to want to "understand" for her book. When she and Cam finally face off, the air crackles with tension, years of hurt bubbling to the surface as two actors at the top of their game stare each other down.

The emotional battle between Rebecca and Cam reflects Shephard's desire to complicate our prevailing understanding of this crime, and the criminal justice system as a whole. Reena's murder was savage, and her killers deserve to face consequences for their actions, but Under the Bridge acknowledges that Rebecca's commitment to documenting the teens' "humanity," particularly Warren's, is valid, too. Cam's storyline — the detective discovers her Native heritage and wrestles with her place in a police force dominated by white men (including her adoptive father, played by Matt Craven) — also offers a window into how race played a role in the crime and subsequent investigation. Rather than shy away from moral complexities like these, the series leans into them, forcing viewers to consider what constitutes "justice" in this case, whether there's a path toward redemption for the teens, and what that process may look like.

For all its success in dramatizing the circumstances surrounding Virk's murder, the limited series does fall prey to some of the genre's unfortunate impulses. Episode 4, "Beautiful British Columbia," shifts the action to the late 1970s, when Suman and Manjit first met, in a clear attempt to expand upon their backstories; these heavy-handed flashbacks are sweet, but they offer little that the 1997-set narrative hasn't already covered. (It doesn't help that the flashbacks are intercut with scenes that so efficiently establish Jo's manipulative nature and Kelly's jealousy, they could stand on their own as a short film.) Later episodes are also marred by clunky dialogue, including a redundant conversation between Rebecca and Cam that suggests the show doesn't trust viewers to put the pieces of this glaringly obvious puzzle together.

But these issues only momentarily detract from Under the Bridge's searing examination of teenage girlhood, violence, and the thin line between sympathizing and enabling. Neither Godfrey nor Shephard claim to have concrete answers about what happened on the other side of the Craigflower Bridge that night, but, paradoxically, by embracing the discomfort of uncertainty, they inch a bit closer to the truth, however tangled it may be.

Under the Bridge premieres Wednesday, April 17 on Hulu. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.