SummaryNovelist Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough) and officer Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone) seek information behind the murder of 14-year old Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) in the limited series based on Godfrey's book about the 1997 case.
SummaryNovelist Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough) and officer Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone) seek information behind the murder of 14-year old Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) in the limited series based on Godfrey's book about the 1997 case.
The show delves into the psyche of teenage bullying, not as some sort of freak show or grotesquery, but rather as another facet of this tragedy. .... Gladstone is the marquee performer in this show, and she brings a tender earnestness to her role.
While it is a triumph in its writing and pacing, it’s the performances that truly carry this series. Gladstone and Keough are phenomenal, especially as their characters reconnect and drift apart; Panjabi is a true force as a mother at her wits’ end. But while the heavy hitters (perhaps expectedly) give tour de force performances, it’s the exceptional outings from the young cast that make this series shine.
Shephard (and others) muddy the waters with detail that isn’t necessary. Gladstone gets her own family disconnects and has a tie to Reena that makes the case important. But Godfrey’s approach doesn’t always emerge as acceptable. To fully understand what’s at play, “Under the Bridge” needed footnotes that didn’t require whole episodes of backstory.
Like so many series, it takes more episodes than it needs to tell its story, and struggles occasionally to settle on a point of view. But it’s gripping, a retelling of a true-life story that is heartbreaking and frustrating.
Despite being based on a grim true-crime yarn, Under the Bridge makes several poor choices in translating the book to the screen, beginning with inserting the author, Rebecca Godfrey, into the story. This bridge into the familiar waters of troubled teens thus proves most notable as Lily Gladstone’s follow-up to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” albeit in a rather drab role as the local cop investigating the case.
Almost everything wrong with the series "Under the Bridge"—based on Rebecca Godfrey's 2005 nonfiction novel about teenage Canadian murder—is about conforming to the standards of TV drama, not to mention the relentlessly unpleasant characters spouting impossibly vapid dialogue. .... The murder-mystery aspect of "Under the Bridge" is more complicated than it might first appear and at moments genuinely baffling. But the details of the case and the characterizations here fit too neatly into a framework of sociological clichés.