OPINION | Northwest-set film ‘Under the Bridge’ flips the true-crime script

by Megan Burbank

I almost didn’t see it Under the bridgethe Hulu miniseries about the life and death of Reena Virk, a Canadian teenager killed by a group of her peers in Saanich, BC, in 1997. Virk was just 14 when she died, and the series, loosely based on Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book of the same name, seemed like another true-crime content capitalizing on real trauma, this time amid the very specific landscapes and complex racial politics of the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t trust the “true crime, a glass of wine, in bed at nine” cottage industry to get it right.

That’s how I feel about most entertainment shows based on true events like Virk’s. True crime has a way of flattening complex, tragic, and often senseless events into convoluted narratives about good victims and monstrous criminal masterminds pursued by noble cops. This characterization is almost violent in its simplicity, a childish portrayal of the legal system and law enforcement that ignores how both actually work – and who they harm the most.

I see little point in telling the same traumatic stories over and over again. Not only does this have the potential to draw unwanted, unhelpful attention to the families of victims, but by portraying people who commit crimes and participate in the underground economy as monsters, it ignores the systemic injustices that can lead to crime in the first place, and those that result in some defendants having few resources while others, particularly prominent men like Donald Trump or Kyle Rittenhouse, have many.

This dynamic does not fit well into the format of a Forensic files Episode in which the poles between victim and perpetrator must be cleanly separated, the perpetrator simply evil and the victim a person – usually a woman and usually white – that brightened every room she entered.

This portrayal of crime is both too simplistic and too contrived to match reality. In my experience as a reporter and juror, most crimes occur under sad and numbing circumstances and often involve people who are very young and/or very desperate. Often it happens by accident. Often it happens because someone has not thought about the consequences of a terrible decision. This is not an area that most true crime stories want to explore, but it is the dynamic at the heart of Under the bridgeand it was a relief to see it presented so clearly.

Under the bridge Riley Keough plays a character loosely based on Godfrey, a New York writer who returns to her childhood home in Victoria to write about the youths the local police refer to as “Bic Girls”: runaways or girls in foster care, children the local police consider expendable. Rebecca quickly becomes embroiled in the complex, brutal dynamics of a particular group of girls led by Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry), who is suspected of involvement in Virk’s murder.

As a journalist, I found the fictional Godfrey almost unbearable: she knows no boundaries with her teenage sources and identifies too closely with one of them, Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton), who was later convicted of involvement in Virk’s murder. As an adult, Glowatski later entered into a process of redemption with Virk’s parents and his Métis elders. His storyline in the series is also handled with care: when he finally confesses to his role in the crime, he offers no easy answers as to why he did it, and his confusion and frustration with himself are far more compelling than any neat narrative explanation one might find in a less grounded series.

While many details in Warren’s story are true to life, Godfrey was, by all accounts, very different from her TV doppelgänger, but she helped develop the series before her death in 2022 and supported the poetic license the series takes with her life. Another invention of the series is Cam Bentland, an Indigenous woman who works for the Saanich Police Department, played by Lily Gladstone. While Godfrey projects her own experiences onto the teenagers around her, Bentland serves as the series’ moral center, a role Killer of the Flower Moon‘s Gladstone plays better than anyone (I wonder if she ever gets bored).

Bentland has her own complicated story: She was adopted by a white family as part of the Sixties Scoop, when Canadian authorities allowed child protection agencies to remove Indigenous children from their families and place them with white adoptive families, a practice that, despite its name, was still in place in the 1980s. That’s not something I would have expected to see in a true-crime series, and Bentland’s story arc, one of the few fully fictionalized in the series, is handled with sensitivity and depth.

This is especially true for Virk, played with lived-in vulnerability and verve by Vritika Gupta in flashbacks, and her parents Manjit and Suman Virk, played by Ezra Faroque Khan and Archie Panjabi. The child of Indian immigrants in Canada, Suman found fellowship among Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose prescribed religious practices Reena rejected as a child, instead desperate to fit into mainstream teen culture. These conflicting desires and the complexities within Reena’s family are explored throughout the series.

As Jeevan Sangha writes at The Tyee: “In eight episodes of Under the bridge“I learned who the Virks really are, about their unfulfilled hopes and dreams for their daughter, and their lifelong commitment to justice on her behalf,” Sangha writes. “I saw Reena for more than what she really was: a 14-year-old girl who misbehaved because she was so desperate to be seen and accepted.”

What’s important is that the show is able to portray the extreme situations that these desires lead to without blaming Reena for them. In my opinion, this delicate balancing act would not have been achieved if the show had been produced with any less care.

The series also doesn’t shy away from addressing the racial dynamics of Reena’s murder – the same dynamics that had made it difficult for Reena and her family to find community in the first place – and this feels like a redemptive evolution of a narrative that, at the time it played out in real life, was more of a cautionary tale against bullying.

I almost didn’t see it Under the bridge because I didn’t think there was anything new to add to this story. But it’s valuable to bring that nuance, to humanize Reena Virk and to make her world complex and careful with all its chaotic inhabitants and competing unmet needs.

It is rare for a series based on true crime to acknowledge the humanity of everyone involved at the core of the story, but Under the bridge is the closest I’ve ever seen an adaptation to this reality. It’s harder to stomach than true crime stories that are less generous in their approach. But that’s what makes the series worth watching.

The South Seattle Emerald strives to create space for diverse viewpoints in our community, recognizing that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect among community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by contributors to this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of Emerald or Emerald’s official policies.

Megan Burbank is a writer and editor based in Seattle. Before going full-time freelance, she worked as an editor and reporter at the Portland Mercury and the Seattle Times. She specializes in business reporting on reproductive health policy and stories at the intersection of gender, politics and culture.

📸 Featured Image: “Under the Bridge” cast – (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, Calif., on Monday, April 15, 2024. (Photo: Sthanlee B. Mirado/Sipa USA via AP Images)