It’s just so sad. A somber tone hangs over Hulu’s very good “Under the Bridge” like a weighted blanket, dragging everyone down into the Canadian ground. It’s a show about characters who carry trauma and are forced into a situation in which they have to watch people work through their own life-changing situations, too. It’s about those rash decisions that young people sometimes make that they can never get back. There have been attempts at true crime stories about the systemic problems in youth culture that often discards children that society deems unwanted, and there have been dozens of stories of bullying, but this one feels more empathetic than almost all the others. It’s a show that’s actively seeking compassion—some might argue it’s offering too much to some people involved in a horrific crime—but what makes it work is its quest for understanding and a trio of actresses who ground what could have been melodrama with nuanced, moving performances.
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In November 1997, Reena Virk, a Canadian 14-year-old, was brutally murdered by a group of her peers. Struggling to find a friend group in which she fit, Virk (played well by Vritika Gupta in the show) had become involved with a group of young women who offered her sanctuary during her teen rebellion from her strict Jehovah’s Witness parents. After a battle with another girl—Nicole Cook in real life but renamed to Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry) in the show—that led to Reena stealing her phone book and calling Nicole’s friends to spread nasty rumors, Virk was basically ambushed by a group that included at least a few people she once called friends. Who exactly was responsible for Reena’s death would become a courtroom controversy and serve as the center of Hulu’s eight-episode telling of this tragic tale.
Sort of. While the writers, including show developer Quinn Shephard, play a bit of a game in the first few episodes about who did what to Reena under the bridge to keep viewers engaged, this is not a typical mystery series with final episode revelations or twists. The picture becomes tragically clear relatively early, making “Under the Bridge” into more of a study of ‘why’ than ‘who’ or ‘how’. And what elevates the writing in that regard is that Shephard and her team don’t provide easy answers. “Under the Bridge” could have been just another tale of bullying gone too far. Still, it’s more ambitious than that, seeking to humanize and understand everyone involved and recognizing that these teenagers who have been forced to act like adults at too young an age are victims too, even if it doesn’t entirely excuse the choices they’ve made.
None of this works without performers who know how to thread the needle between the story’s more naturally melodramatic beats and more nuanced character work. The always-good and often-great Riley Keough plays Godfrey herself, a writer who returns to her hometown to work on a book and basically stumbles into the story of Reena Virk. It starts when she befriends Josephine, which allows Keough some interesting beats in which she sees right through Bell’s performative nature while also offering the young woman more respect than she usually gets. But Keough really gets to shine in a dynamic with a kid named Warren Glowatski (the excellent Javon Walton), in whom she sees a version of her dead brother, who lost his life to suicide. Keough is such a giving performer, always willing to cede scene focus to her co-stars in a way that makes the whole production better.
The same could be said for Lily Gladstone, who delivers again, hot off the heels of her near Oscar win for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The natural performer plays Cam Bentland, the cop who leads the investigation despite the interference (sometimes overwritten) of her Police Chief father. Cam shares a past with Rebecca, which allows Keough and Gladstone some great emotional exchanges, but Cam’s arc also works completely on its own because of how much Gladstone grounds the show. She’s just one of those performers who fully embodies characters—we believe she is thinking, feeling, and responding instead of merely waiting to say her lines.
Keough and Gladstone will get a lot of the buzz around “Under the Bridge,” but the whole cast works. Izzy G is impactful as one of the girls who would become known as the Shoreline Six; Guidry understands the kind of overconfidence that’s really rooted in insecurity; Aiyana Goodfellow is powerful as the girl who felt closest to Reena; Walton steals the show in terms of young performers, giving Warren an arc that goes from numb to open wound. As for the adults, Archie Panjabi matches Gladstone and Keough by virtue of what she doesn’t do. As Reena’s grieving mother, Suman, Panjabi never succumbs to the manipulative melodrama that this character could have easily wallowed in. It makes her work all the more heartbreaking because we believe it.
Believing it is the key to the success of “Under the Bridge.” The first couple of episodes falter a bit in this category with some dialogue, especially for the young characters, that sounds manufactured, but that falls away as the performers and writers are allowed to flesh out these people beyond how they try to look to other people. Be patient with it. It deserves it. In a sense, that’s what the show is about: It’s the tale of a cop, a writer, a teenager who thinks she’s a gangster and another who just wants a connection, but all of them become more than their one-sentence character description. Human beings are complicated. And often so, so sad. [B+]