‘Under the Bridge’ navigates the true crime waters of troubled teenagers

‘Under the Bridge’ navigates the true crime waters of troubled teenagers

Although based on a grim true-crime yarn, “Under the Bridge” made some poor choices in translating the book to the screen, starting with inserting the author, Rebecca Godfrey, into the story. This bridge to the familiar waters of troubled youth proved most famous as Lily Gladstone’s follow-up to “The Flower Moon Killer,” albeit in a rather dull role as the local cop investigating the case.

The eight-episode Hulu series revolves around 14-year-old Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta), whose desire to fit in with her peers unravels against the backdrop of learning some of them took part in beating and killing her. That event shocked the Canadian city of Victoria in 1997, providing the basis for Godfrey’s book.

Like “13 Reasons Why,” the controversial Netflix series, and before that like the 1986 film “River’s Edge,” the story is set in unsettling teenage angst before the modern age of social media. Reena’s disappearance, and eventual discovery, is also every parent’s nightmare, with Archie Panjabi (“The Good Wife”) and Ezra Faroque Khan as the rushed and then devastated mother and father.

Told through flashbacks, “Under the Bridge” errs by creating a separate thread around Rebecca (Riley Keough, fresh from another streaming show in “Daisy Jones & the Six”), a writer who returns to her hometown who experiences her own tragedy there. many years before. Almost immediately, she reconnects with the sheriff, Cam (Gladstone), with whom she shares a history, while conducting a parallel real-time investigation into what happened.

It’s an awkward, unconvincing build, as are most of the details surrounding Rebecca and Cam, which feel strained or just tired. The former almost immediately sympathizes with those who may be responsible, while the latter struggles with working for his father (Matt Craven).

Those elements represent a distraction from the fundamental issues of what happened to Reena, what motivated her assailant and the collective silence from her peers after the tragedy.

Indeed, the series fared much better when the focus shifted to teenagers, including Chloe Guidry as the leader of a gang of violent girls — known dismissively in police circles as “the Bic girls,” a reference to the dispensability of troubled Victorian youth — and Javon “Wanna” Walton (“Euphoria”) as one of the boys involved.

Adapted by writer-producer Quinn Shephard (“Not Okay”), “Under the Bridge” builds modest tension around the specifics of who killed Reena, but that doesn’t fully offset its questionable structural decisions. Those flaws don’t detract from the heartbreaking nature of the story at its core, but they do make wading through the eight episodes of this limited series sometimes feel like a bridge too far.