True crime dramas seldom provide understanding. This one is different

Under the Bridge ★★★★

Genuine understanding is often the last thing a true crime drama provides. The horror of what happened in real life takes over on screen, even as the fictionalised characters seek to apply justice. The how tends to overwhelm the why. But this wrenching, insightful 2024 American limited series, which is making its free-to-air debut, achieves a sad, necessary balance. It struggles to make sense of the inexplicable, and to ask what ultimately divides the perpetrators and the investigators, the victim and those who looked away.

Jo Bell (Chloe Guidry), a schoolmate of the dead Reena, and Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone), the police officer investigating the murder, in Under the Bridge.

A story that dominated the news cycle in Canada at the time, Under the Bridge explores the 1997 murder of Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta). A teenager in British Columbia town of Saanich, Reena is the daughter of Suman (Archie Panjabi) and Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan). She rebels against their Indian heritage and Jehovah’s Witnesses faith, trying to earn the friendship of a clique of female schoolmates, led by the capricious Jo Bell (Chloe Guidry), who used gangster rap and street gangs as empowering imagery.

Reena goes out one chilly November night to meet the girls who had been alternately encouraging and tormenting her, and her battered body is discovered the next morning. Her family is devastated, the wider community shocked, and the authorities ill-prepared. It’s two locals that sit apart who advance the case: police officer Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone) is the adopted First Nations daughter of the police chief, while her long absent friend, Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough), is a writer wrestling with grief.

Under the Bridge was adapted from Godfrey’s 2005 literary non-fiction of the same name. Creator Quinn Shephard worked closely with Godfrey, who passed away just before the limited series started production, and they shaped a story where the questions asked are diverse and difficult to answer. The storytelling can be idiosyncratic or unexpected: a scene that suggests a generic dynamic will not unfold as expected, while one episode is an extended flashback to the courtship between Reena’s parents in 1979.

Vritika Gupta plays Canadian teenager Reena, whose murder is investigated in Under the Bridge.

The show looks thoughtfully at the many factors that tragically intersected on Reena’s final night alive, whether it’s the racism and suspicion the Virk family had to navigate, or how teenagers like Jo, who lives in a group home overseen by social services, have already been written off by many locals before they’ve done anything wrong. The one boy present on the night Reena died, Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton), comes into focus as an unbuoyed figure, and his bond with Rebecca is tender and doomed.

Both Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) and Keough (Daisy Jones and the Six) give cohesive performances that pull and fray at the conventions of their characters. You can feel the former’s Cam bristling at the off-hand dismissals of the town’s disadvantaged, realising she could easily have been one of them. The latter’s Rebecca silently knows that her empathy for all involved must eventually come up against her desire to write about what happened, to pass a written judgment.

Under the Bridge grapples with brutal events, but it is not interested in wielding that brutality to shock audiences. It wants to engage with responsibility, anger, and even forgiveness; who killed Reena is not the only mystery that it is trying to solve. There may be the odd wayward touch, but overall it’s a compelling achievement. True crime needs more shows like this.

Under the Bridge is now streaming on SBS On Demand.

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