‘Under the Bridge’ review: Heartbreaking Hulu series shows how bullies took the life of an unhappy teen

The eight-part Hulu dramatic series “Under the Bridge” is based on the true events of a tragic 1997 murder case in British Columbia that attracted media scrutiny across Canada and beyond, so it wouldn’t be accurate to call this a murder mystery. We know 14-year-old Reena Virk was bullied, beaten and eventually killed, and it would be disrespectful to withhold these facts out of some kind of spoiler concern.

Still, with Quinn Shepard doing award-quality work in adapting the late Rebecca Godfrey’s book of the same name, “Under the Bridge” actually IS a mystery on many levels, as it examines how and why a group of junior high school-age students, most of them girls, would turn on a peer in such horrific fashion.

With Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone spearheading the cast as two women approaching the investigation from vastly different angles, and an impressive group of actors turning in superb work as the shockingly young principals in the case, “Under the Bridge” works as a retelling of a specific time-and-place story, but also a sobering reminder this sort of thing still happens to this day, and far too often. (And these days, social media is often used to fan the flames.)

The suburban setting of “Under the Bridge” is considered a perfect place to live by adult residents such as Police Chief Roy Bentland (Matt Craven) and the upper-middle-class Virks, Suman (Archie Panjabi) and Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan). Contrast that with Roy’s daughter Cam (Lily Gladstone from “Killers of the Flower Moon”), a police officer who yearns for bigger challenges and has applied for a job with the Vancouver police department, and Chloe Guidry’s Josephine Bell, the undisputed leader of a group of troubled girls who live in a group home. (While most of the characters are based on real people, Cam is a fictional construct.) Josephine, a hard-bitten and charming manipulator, worships John Gotti and the gangster lifestyle, and talks incessantly about her dream of moving to New York City and working for Gotti.

This girl is 14 years old. Her so-called ambitions would be laughable if Josephine weren’t dead serious, and her acolytes, including the cold-blooded and calculating Kelly (Izzy G.) and the more sensitive but still pliable Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow) are all too willing to follow Josephine into trouble every day, from skipping school to shoplifting to getting high to more nefarious activities.

Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta), the daughter of Suman and Manjit, hates her home life with her loving but strict Jehovah’s Witness parents. An outcast at school who is mocked for her race and her appearance, she is achingly desperate to gain acceptance into Josephine’s gang. From our perspective, it’s all too obvious Josephine is toying with and exploiting Reena for her own gains, but Reena doesn’t see it. Things turn sour, and there’s a party where everything explodes, and the next morning Reena is missing, and we know she is never coming home.

While all this is happening, Riley Keough’s Rebecca has returned home to British Columbia for the first time in a decade. Rebecca’s plan to write about the culture of “Victoria Girls” in general quickly segues into an ad hoc investigation into Reena’s disappearance. (There’s also some complicated history between Rebecca and Cam.) To say Rebecca’s methods are unconventional is an understatement; she practically embeds with the local teens, making bad choices that veer dangerously close to obstruction.

While “Under the Bridge” casts an unblinking eye on Josephine and her cohorts, and Cam’s approach is all about finding justice for Reena, there’s an undercurrent of empathy or at least an attempt to understand how these kids could be so callous and violent. When a bunch of students are brought in for questioning, most of them don’t have a parent or guardian who can be bothered to be there. (In an earlier exchange, Rebecca learns the police call Josephine and her friends “Bic girls,” like the lighters, “because we’re disposable.”)

The best true-crime series acknowledge our collective fascination with stories about seemingly “normal” people who commit unspeakable crimes — but they also portray the lives of the victim(s) in a way that makes sure these innocent people should be remembered for more than the manner in which they were taken from this world. This is the case with “Under the Bridge.” The series takes great care to tell the backstory of the Virk family, to illustrate the anguish and loneliness Reena Virk was feeling as a girl trapped between worlds, and to remind us Reena was much more than a victim on a security camera. The result is a riveting and heartbreakingly realistic work.