OPINION | Northwest-Set 'Under the Bridge' Flips the Script on True Crime

by Megan Burbank

I almost didn't watch Under the Bridge, the Hulu limited series based on the life and death of Reena Virk, a Canadian teenager who was killed by a group of her peers in Saanich, B.C., in 1997. Virk was just 14 when she died, and the series, based loosely on Rebecca Godfrey's 2005 book of the same name, seemed like yet another piece of true crime content capitalizing on real-life trauma, this one set amid the highly specific landscapes and complex racial politics of the Pacific Northwest. I didn't trust the "true crime, glass of wine, bed by nine" cottage industry to get it right.

I feel this way about most entertainment based on real-life stories like Virk's. True crime has a way of flattening complex, tragic, and often senseless events into twisty narratives of good victims and monstrous criminal masterminds tracked by noble cops. This characterization is almost violent in its simplicity, a childish depiction of the legal system and law enforcement that ignores how both actually operate — and who they harm the most.

I see little value in churning out the same traumatic stories again and again. Not only does this carry the potential to bring unwanted, unhelpful attention onto the families of victims, but by framing people who commit crimes and participate in underground economies as monsters, it makes no acknowledgment of the systemic inequities that can lead to crime in the first place, nor those that mean some people accused of crimes have few resources on hand while others, especially high-profile men like Donald Trump or Kyle Rittenhouse, have many.

These dynamics don't fit well into the format of, say, a Forensic Files episode, which needs the poles between victim and perpetrator to be tidily distant, the perpetrator simply evil, and the victim a person — usually a woman, and usually white — who lit up every room she walked into.

This depiction of crime is both too simple and too constructed to align with reality. In my experience as a reporter and a juror, most crime happens under sad and numbing circumstances, and often involves people who are very young and or very desperate. Frequently, it happens by accident. Often, it happens because someone didn't think through the consequences of making a terrible choice. This is not territory most true crime narratives are interested in exploring, but it's the dynamic at the heart of Under the Bridge, and it came as a relief to see it depicted so clearly.

Under the Bridge stars Riley Keough as a character loosely based on Godfrey, a New York writer who returns to her family home in Victoria to write about the youth local cops refer to as "Bic girls": Runaways or girls in foster care, they are children local law enforcement view as disposable. Rebecca quickly gets caught up in the complex, brutal dynamics of one group of girls in particular, led by Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry), who is suspected of being an accomplice in killing Virk.

As a journalist, I found the fictional Godfrey almost unwatchable: She has no boundaries with her teenage sources, overidentifying with one of them, Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton), who would later be convicted of participating in Virk's murder. As an adult, Glowatski later entered into a restorative justice process with Virk's parents and his Mtis elders. His arc on the series is also handled carefully: When he ultimately confesses to his role in the crime, he doesn't offer easy answers for why he did it, and his confusion and frustration with himself are much more compelling than any tidy narrative explanation you might encounter in a show less moored in reality.

While many of the particulars in Warren's story align with real life, Godfrey was by all accounts very different from her TV doppelganger, but she helped develop the series before her death in 2022, and was supportive of the poetic license the show takes with her life. Another of the show's inventions is Cam Bentland, an Indigenous woman working for the Saanich Police played by Lily Gladstone. Where Godfrey projects her own experiences onto the teens around her, Bentland serves as the series' moral center, a role Killers of the Flower Moon's Gladstone plays better than anyone (I wonder if she ever gets bored with it).

Bentland has her own complicated story: She was adopted by a white family as part of the Sixties Scoop, when Canadian authorities allowed child welfare organizations to take Indigenous children from their homes and place them with white adoptive families, a practice that despite its name was still happening as recently as the 1980s. This isn't something I expected to see in a series about true crime, and Bentland's arc, one of the few the show fully fictionalized, is handled with sensitivity and depth.

Most importantly, so are Virk, played with lived-in vulnerability and verve by Vritika Gupta in flashback sequences, and her parents, Manjit and Suman Virk, played by Ezra Faroque Khan and Archie Panjabi. As the child of Indian immigrants in Canada, Suman found community among Jehovah's Witnesses, whose prescriptive religious practices Reena would grow up resisting, wanting badly to fit in with mainstream teenage culture instead. These competing desires and complexity within Reena's family are covered in the course of the series.

As Jeevan Sangha writes at The Tyee: "In eight episodes of Under the Bridge, I learned about who the Virks really are, their unfulfilled hopes and dreams for their daughter and their lifelong commitment to justice in her name," writes Sangha. "I saw Reena for more of who she was, a 14-year-old girl who acted out because she so desperately wanted to be seen and accepted."

Importantly, the show is able to depict the extreme situations these desires lead to without laying any of the blame at Reena's feet, a delicate balance I'm not sure would've been successful had the show been made with even a little less care.

The series also doesn't resist addressing the racial dynamics of Reena's murder — the same dynamics that made finding community challenging for Reena and her family in the first place — and this feels like a reparative development for a narrative that, at the time it unfolded in real life, was framed more generally as a cautionary tale about bullying.

I almost didn't watch Under the Bridge because I didn't think there was anything new to add to this story. But there is value in bringing this nuance, in humanizing Reena Virk and framing her world with complexity and care, with all of its messy occupants and competing unmet needs.

It's rare to see a true crime-adjacent series acknowledge the humanity of everyone involved in the story at its core, but Under the Bridge is the closest I've ever seen an adaptation get to that reality. It's harder to watch than true crime narratives that take a less generous approach. But that's what makes the show worth watching.

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📸 Featured Image: "Under the Bridge" cast — (from left to right) Ezra Faroque Khan, Riley Keough, Vritika Gupta, Lily Gladstone, Chloe Guidry, Izzy G., Javon "Wanna" Walton, and Aiyana Goodfellow — at the Hulu Los Angeles premiere held at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles, California, on Monday, April 15, 2024. (Photo: Sthanlee B. Mirado/Sipa USA via AP Images)