under the bridge: vritika gupta, lily gladstone’s series is chilling but somehow too soft© Provided by Times Now

In 1997 Reena Virk was brutally murdered in Saanich, Canada by six of her local Canadian “friends”. Reena was Canadian too. But she was just not white enough to belong. The brutality of the killing continues to be shocking so many years after.

Does this Mubi serial adaptation, which came to a closure on May 29, do justice to that true crime? Well, yes and no. While Under The Bridge (that is the location of the murder, if you must know) does get the facts right and the actors are mostly convincing, the savagery of the violence against that poor child is just not captured here, or maybe it is not captured with the intensity one expected.

If we go back to Lily Gladstone’s career-changing Killers Of The Flower Moon last year, where she played the murder victim Mollie Kyle, the impact of her vulnerability and the violence perpetrated on it was chilling. Here in Under The Bridge the murder victim, an Indian migrant in Canada, comes across as annoying rather than vulnerable.

As played by one 14-year-old Vritika Gupta, the tragedy of Reena Virk’s murder is lost in translation. All we saw was a rebellious rude 14-year-old Indian-Canadian girl in a migrant family repeatedly humiliating and crushing her parents’ hope and happiness. What this brat needed was severe discipline. Instead, Reena keeps running off for spiritual gang bangs with a bunch of screwed-up teenage girls who have never known a home or family.

At the end of the intriguing but incomplete crime serial, we were yet to know why the self-appointed teen terror outfit took Reena’s life so brutally. Hate crime? Not enough motive. Why was Reena so eager to be part of that despicable girl gang which seems to be awkwardly emblematic of all that is wrong with the migrants’ acceptance?

The sequences showing Reena trying hard to “belong” with her future murderers are over-crafted. There is a vital dinner sequence at Reena’s home where her parents Manjit and Suman(Archie Panjabi is excellent as the latter) try to make the bunch of barely-closeted sociopath girls feel welcome. After the dinner, Suman finds a prized pair of jhumkas missing and Reena screams at her parents for making her “friends” uncomfortable with their scrutiny.

The awkwardness of the above encounter is ample proof that all is not well in the makeshift tranquillity of the migrants’ world. Who does Reena choose to impose her presence on a group of sociopaths who clearly despise her? Is it some kind of a death wish? Isn’t she too young to be harbouring a death wish?

Parallel to this catastrophic camaraderie between a family-oriented migrant kid and a bunch of homeless delinquents is a love story between cop Cam Bentland(Lily Gladstone) and a journalist-writer Rebecca Godfrey(Riley Keough), the latter playing the author on whose book this series is based. Both the actresses know their work, and play the two key characters capably.

But what’s with every other female cop in the OTT serials being a lesbian? It has become as much of a cliché as all dress designers being portrayed as gay.

Under The Bridge is not without its merits. The directors of the eight episodes (two of them Geeta Vasant Patil and Nimisha Mukerji are of Indian origin) assimilate the facts behind the messy hate crime into a graceful aesthetic experience. But at the end of it, we are not too sure Reena Virk’s case got the closure it deserved. Some stories are better untold. This is one of them.