Hulu’s New True-Crime Drama, About the Murder of a Teen by Other Teens, Does a Rare Thing

The 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk at the hands of a group fellow teenagers in Greater Victoria, British Columbia, was one of those crimes that took over the discourse of its time. It came at the dawn of an outbreak of concern about mean girls and the cruelty of the female adolescent social order—exactly the dynamic that conspired to destroy Reena. To the Canadian media, it provided the occasion for a moral panic about degenerate youths, bullying, rap music, and gangs, despite the fact that the kids involved were mostly suburbanites who only fantasized about the thug life.

Hulu’s new limited series about Reena’s murder, Under the Bridge, refuses such easy alarmism. Based on a 2005 nonfiction book of the same title by Rebecca Godfrey, who grew up in Victoria before leaving for New York, this sensitive, thoughtful adaptation features Godfrey herself as a character, played by Riley Keough. Back in Victoria—a picturesque island community that Rebecca seems to hate for unspecified reasons—Rebecca is writing about teenage girls there when Reena’s (Vritika Gupta) murder occurs, providing her with the ideal subject. A former bad girl herself, pale and self-possessed, swathed in a cool Marc Jacobs coat and big-city glamour, Rebecca has better luck extracting the facts about Reena’s murder from the wary teens than her old friend Cam, a police officer played by a delightfully butch Lily Gladstone.

As far as I can discern, Cam and Rebecca’s complicated relationship with her are fictional. Godfrey did not aid the investigation of Reena’s murder in real life, as she does in the series, but her book is an evocative and deeply researched account of the volatile cliques and status-jockeying that resulted in the crime—the In Cold Blood of adolescence. Godfrey, who died in 2022, was an executive producer of the series, and it is that rare adaptation that’s even richer than its already impressive source. It features a scene in which Rebecca’s father (Paul Jarrett) peruses the pages of her work in progress and points out that Reena has little presence there, an objection some readers have made to the book. The series makes up for this by devoting an entire episode to Reena’s family, Southeast Asians who felt out of place in British Columbia until they were welcomed into the Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as many flashbacks to Reena’s experiences in the months leading up to her murder. Cam, a First Nations woman adopted by the town’s white police chief as a child, raises but is unable to settle the question of the role that race may have played in the crime.

What no one doubts is that the intensity and toxicity of teenage social life are behind Reena’s murder. She desperately longed to be included in the clique orbiting a girl, Jo (a pseudonym used by the press in compliance with Canadian law), living in the Seven Oaks group home. Played by Chloe Guidry, Jo is a pouty, cat-eyed vixen who worships John Gotti and Biggie Smalls, and whose dearest ambition is to make it to New York to become the first female hitman for the mob. Jo’s best friend, Kelly (Izzy G), lives with her affluent single mother, but harbors similar dreams. A third girl, Dusty (a composite figure, and a magnificently vulnerable performance by Aiyana Goodfellow), serves as their sometimes ambivalent sidekick. Reena’s pious mother (Archie Panjabi) and kindly but clueless dad (Ezra Faroque Khan) vainly struggle to pry her away from the rebel allure of these bad girls.

Jo alternately includes and excludes Reena, flaunting the control she wields by virtue of her prettiness and swaggering self-confidence. When Godfrey’s book was first published, the fact that young girls can be vicious or violent, and the baroque methods by which they amass and exercise social power over each other, felt like daring, underexplored topics. This older, seasoned version of Under the Bridge is more interested in how (with one exception) each character’s actions and choices are a displaced response to past wrongs and sufferings. A boy (played by Javon “Wanna” Walton) becomes complicit in Reena’s death because he’s angry at being abandoned to homelessness by his father. Rebecca finds herself defending that boy because she feels guilty for bullying a brother who died. Even Jo’s preposterous adoption of gangster bravado has its roots in the helplessness she felt with her druggie mom’s abusive boyfriend. She fantasizes about returning one day to cap him.

Under the Bridge may begin as a true-crime dramatization, but it arrives at this sweeping, tragic vision of the harm human beings do to each other. The damage pingpongs from one person to another, multiplying itself until it culminates in a catastrophic event like Reena’s death. True, there is one sociopathic figure at the center of this story, someone whose malevolence seems to arise from no cause at all. In the years since Reena’s murder, that person has become the sole focus of public revulsion. But Under the Bridge illustrates how that malevolence finds its foothold within a web of unacknowledged, unaddressed suffering. When Reena’s father tells his wife that they must move their family back to India because “there is something wrong with this place,” she replies, “It’s not this place. We can’t run away from this.”

Eventually, Reena’s family would find it within themselves to make a superhuman act of forgiveness, depicted in a beautifully written and acted scene in the final episode of a series overflowing with fierce performances. Transcendence is hard to find in true-crime narratives, where the waste of human life and the infliction of needless pain usually overwhelm even the satisfactions of justice. This is one of the rare stories to find some measure of hope among the wreckage.