Under the Bridge ★★★★
Disney+
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It’s a sad truth that terrible real-life crimes can make for mundane television drama. Sometimes those grim autopsies and anguished interrogations serve as nothing more than tropes to be ticked off. One of the strengths of this impressive American true crime drama is that it recognises those limits and surpasses them. Made with both harsh necessity and genuine insight, Under the Bridge is idiosyncratic, even untoward at times. But the care with which it treats all of the central characters, regardless of their actions, prevails.
A scene from the true-crime drama Under The Bridge.Credit: Disney+
The crime is incomprehensible, a dilemma which echoes across this limited series: on a cold November night in the Canadian town of Saanich, 14-year-old Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) is found dead after going out with the group of local girls she craved to be accepted by. The circumstances are bleak from the start, as is the casual cruelty of Reena’s sometimes friends, led by the gangster-obsessed Jo Bell (Chloe Guidry). The “who” question unfolds over the initial episodes, but underpinned by first-rate performances, the show is as much about the limits of finding out why.
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Under the Bridge was adapted from writer Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 non-fiction book of the same name about the case. Filmmaker Quinn Shephard and Godfrey, who passed away just before production commenced, carefully sketch intersecting concerns. Reena is desperate to escape both the Indian heritage and Jehovah’s Witness faith of her parents, Suman (Archie Panjabi) and Manjit (Ezra Faroque Khan) for a hip-hop fuelled friendship with the mercurial Jo and her clique. Racism and shame reverberate through the teenage girls’ fraught dynamic.
The official response is haphazard and sometimes biased, and it is two comparative outsiders who are essential to the case. Local police officer Cam Bentland (Lily Gladstone), who has a First Nations heritage but was adopted by the Saanich police chief, implicitly understands Reena’s outsider status, while her childhood friend, author Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough), has just returned to town to deal with her own trauma by writing a book about the town’s girls. Both are obsessive, both are compromised.
The narrative is panoramic by design. The flashbacks extend to an episode focused on how Reena’s parents met in 1979, which links her struggle to previous generations of the Virk family, while the sociological insight – Jo, for example, lives in a girl’s home the local community sneers at – is acute. But what resonates is the intimate connection between these characters. The relationship between Rebecca and the lone boy present when Reena died, Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton), is heartbreaking. On this show everyone is valued, no matter the cost.
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How to Rob a Bank ★★★½
Netflix
Over four years starting in 1992 the armed robber the FBI nicknamed “Hollywood” stole approximately $3 million from Seattle banks.Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
This Netflix documentary about a prolific American bank robber deserves to be seen on the big screen, if only because Hollywood movies were central to his crimes: the heists were inspired by Point Break and the anti-establishment philosophy of Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, while Heat’s cataclysmic shootout when a job goes wrong terrified the real-life criminal. You can argue that this feature-length does – or does not – have a Hollywood ending, but either way it’s watchable.
