‘Under the Bridge,’ a well-acted mini-series, based on a real-life 1997 murder

“Below the Bridge” is an eight-part Hulu miniseries based mostly on the e-book of the identical identify by Rebecca Godfrey, concerning the 1997 homicide of a teenage lady by fellow youngsters in a small Canadian city. The sequence casts a large internet, displaying the crime, the occasions main as much as the crime, and the next investigations and trials.

It’s an entertaining sequence, well-cast and well-acted, and that includes what’s, at its core, a compelling story. Nonetheless, two flaws hold it from being a whole success.

The primary is  a number of the later episodes look like a willful try to stretch the operating time till it snaps. There should not solely flashbacks however flashbacks inside flashbacks. The sequence even takes time to inform the story of the courtship of the murdered lady’s mother and father within the Nineteen Seventies, in addition to episodes from Godfrey’s childhood within the Eighties. We neither have to know this data nor are we .

The sequence’ second flaw has merely to do with the frustration that always comes when watching one thing that we all know is barely partly true. Lily Gladstone is gorgeous right here because the delicate policewoman on the case, who has a complete backstory as an indigenous individual  adopted as a child by a white household. However the policewoman is a fictitious character, so it’s a little bit troublesome to get labored up about her emotions for Rebecca (Riley Keough), with whom she is meant to have had some private historical past.

It appears to me that the rule for adapting a real-life story is that one ought to have whole license to invent when the precise particulars are unavailable. For instance, if two folks had a dialog, however you don’t know what they mentioned, you can also make up what you assume they could have mentioned.

However you shouldn’t invent main characters and occasions that didn’t occur and have them work together and mingle with true occasions and actual folks. To try this undermines no matter cautionary worth “Below the Bridge” may need had as a narrative about bullying and turns it right into a mere leisure based mostly on different folks’s ache and struggling.

Nonetheless, other than these caveats, “Below the Bridge” is a superior mini-series, with plenty of attention-grabbing characters and conditions. Within the opening episodes, the long run sufferer, Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta), falls in with a harmful group of ladies, led by Josephine (Chloe Guidry), who aspires to be greater than a imply lady. An aficionado of mafia films, her dream is to maneuver to New York and work for the charismatic mob boss John Gotti.

In the meantime, as Rebecca Godfrey, a author that comes dwelling searching for her subsequent e-book, Keough suggests an advanced and contradictory persona — somebody poised, however with a screw free, somebody grounded and observant, but in addition reckless. The efficiency is an arresting tribute to the writer, who died in 2022 on the age of 54.

Nonetheless, the ladies are those that the majority seize your consideration. Guidry is a examine in oblivious menace, dominating each scene she’s in. Her flashiness is properly balanced by Izzy G. who, as Kelly Eldard, brings out a much less flashy however equally unsettling number of cruelty — calm, implacable and weirdly self-satisfied.

The primary two episodes, which debut on April 17, are the perfect, however each episode has its deserves. “Below the Bridge” may have been an awesome six-episode sequence. Because it stands, it’s a great eight-episode sequence.

Attain Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com