Another term for a destructive cycle is a whirlpool, something with so much centrifugal force it pulls everything in its proximity downward, into destruction. A whirlpool sits at the heart of Under the Bridge, an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s haunting book about the 1997 murder of teenager Reena Virk in Saanich, British Columbia. Rebecca, portrayed in the series by Riley Keough with a blackened bob and 90s grunge style, is just returned home to complete a book inspired by her own experiences growing up in Greater Victoria, an area of wild natural beauty and deep silence, a place of which her father says, “I don’t know why you’d want to leave.”
But clearly, Rebecca couldn’t get away fast enough. She ran all the way to New York, only to boomerang back searching for inspiration. Her idea is vague—something about girls, something about growing up, something about Victoria—her notes impressionistic, she seems aimless even as she has a purpose, to finish this book she can’t write anywhere but home, even though she clashes with her mother within minutes of arriving and seems almost sickened by the landscape around her. Rebecca slinks around town, talking into her tape recorder and charming her way into a halfway house called Seven Oaks, a place where a friend of hers once lived. Now, she finds a group of tough girls captained by Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry), a tough girl with flawless winged eye liner and a love of all things gangster, from the old school mafia to Biggie Smalls.
Just as Rebecca homes in on Jo as a potential subject, the news announces that local teenager Reena Virk is missing, and Rebecca’s ears prick up once again. She recognizes the name from Jo and her clique, she starts poking into the underbrush, and quickly finds herself at the center of a shocking murder case. Rebecca was almost out of whatever dark force pulls the girls of Victoria ever downward, but she stood too still too long in the waters, and Charybdis sunk its teeth in once again.
At the same time, police officer Cam Bentland is still trying to escape the sucking maw of Victoria. Her father is the police chief, her brother is a fellow officer, her family loves her, but it doesn’t stop her father saying he’d rather Cam lean on new affirmative action provisions to get a job in Vancouver rather than write a recommendation himself. As Cam, Lily Gladstone is fiercely interior, a woman who suppresses so much every day, from her abilities to her opinions to her sexuality to her First Nations identity. She is Rebecca’s once upon a time Seven Oaks friend, eventually adopted into a white family, and she does a daily impression of assimilation, until Rebecca comes back and stirs up old flames and bitterness.
And then there is Reena, played by Vritika Gupta with a mix of devastating vulnerability and ferocious teenaged wrath. The kids of Under the Bridge feel like real kids—they’re assholes, you kind of want to shove them into traffic, but every once in a while, they lift the curtain on some inner pain that reminds you that growing up sucks in the best of circumstances, and none of these kids are living the best of circumstances. Reena is isolated twice over, brown daughter of an immigrant family in a predominately white area, and as a Jehovah’s Witness, a religious minority, too. Reena has no friends, no siblings near her own age, the only family member that seems to understand her is her fun uncle, Raj (Anoop Desai), who sneaks her birthday presents and buys her rap CDs.
There is a depressing rhythm to Under the Bridge that links the girls and women of Victoria. Early on, Rebecca implies that Victoria does something to kids, to girls in particular, that is unique and must be captured for outsiders to understand. Reena’s murder comes to embody Rebecca’s half-baked thesis, bringing it into tragic focus. Here is a young girl, beaten and murdered by other young girls—and one boy, Warren Glowatski (Javon “Wanna” Walton), who is drowning alongside Reena, Jo, and the other posturing youths of Victoria. The adults freak out, blaming the murder on gangster rap, LA gangs, anything and everything to avoid looking in the mirror.
Even when Cam raises the issue of race—all of Reena’s attackers were thought to be white—she is dismissed because the kids drew gang symbols in their notebooks and called themselves the “Crip Mafia Cartel”. Cam, the lone brown girl in the room, understands something of the forces that conspired to make Reena a unique target, but she doesn’t have the support to push her theory to the fore, and so instead it fades in favor of shallow moral panic. Victoria’s Charybdis ensures no one has the energy to fight for anyone else, you can only hope to save yourself, and that is often a dim hope, indeed.
There is an issue with Under the Bridge, one familiar in the streaming age, and that is that even at just eight episodes, it’s a little long. Six hours is probably the magic number to tell this tale, to tighten it up and turn it into the horror story it wants to be. Stretched to eight hours, Bridge does make room for telling Reena’s story from every angle, particularly from her own perspective and her family’s—the church that she finds so alienating is, almost tragically, a source of comfort and community for her parents after they felt alienated themselves by their white neighbors—but it lags in places through the middle episodes.
Still, it’s not a dealbreaker. The performances are rich enough, particularly from Gladstone, Guidry, and Archie Panjabi as Reena’s mother, Suman, to keep the show interesting. Episode three, “Blood Oath”, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, is especially good, as Hardwicke has always had a soft touch with teenaged actors and characters. And the finale features a heartbreaking depiction of restorative justice in action that attempts to break the downward cycles of Victoria for good.
Under the Bridge does not provide easy answers to hard questions. The why of Reena Virk’s murder remains murky, the motives slippery and hard to articulate. What the series does do is illustrate why, even after almost 30 years, Reena’s death continues to haunt, and why any explanation is so hard to offer. The whirlpool at the heart of Victoria is never vanquished, there is no hero moment and no heroes to deliver it. Cam and Rebecca survived their girlhoods in Victoria, but they can’t explain why they lived when others didn’t, any more than the kids involved in Reena’s murder can definitively say why they did the things they did. There is only Charybdis, ever hungry, and the girls desperate to escape its grip.
Under the Bridge is now streaming the first two episodes on Hulu. New episodes premiere every Wednesday.
