The most predictable plot twist
Under the Bridge and Hollywood's forgiveness fetish
In 1997, a 14-year-old Canadian girl named Reena Virk disappeared after a party with friends. The party was held under a bridge in a suburb of Victoria, British Columbia, and when Virk’s body was discovered, she’d been badly beaten and pebbles were found in her lungs, indicating that she’d been forcibly drowned.
Hulu’s new miniseries Under the Bridge is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Rebecca Godfrey, who died from cancer in 2022, shortly before production on the series began. Starring Riley Keogh as Godfrey and Lilly Gladstone as an invented composite character based on several different law enforcement officers, the show takes some liberties with the story of Virk’s killing. And some of those liberties lead to a distorted portrait of what really happened when it came to Virk’s parents and her killers.
(spoilers ahead for those who haven’t watched the series).
Virk, as it turned out, was killed not by one person, but by a group of teenagers later nicknamed “the Shoreline six.” Some of these were kids with the typical laundry list of “troubled teen” issues — parental neglect, drugs, behavioral problems, mental health struggles. The show focuses on a trio of girls who lived in a group home, who Virk tried to befriend. These girls were obsessed with crime boss John Gotti and hip hop, and the series leans hard on their attempts to borrow Biggie Smalls’ swagger, which mostly comes off as a cringe-inducing pose.
But Virk, like a lot of teenage girls, seems to have been lonely and isolated, and she idolized these girls. She even got to the point where she lied about her father sexually molesting her so that she’d be moved into the same group home where the girls lived. Virk’s father was a Sikh immigrant who fell in love with Virk’s mother, a Canadian of Indian descent whose family had been converted by Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he too ended up converting to the religion.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are a fundamentalist, apocalyptic Christian denomination, and one of their core beliefs is that we are living in “the great tribulation” — the precursor to Armageddon and Christ’s return, which only they will survive. This tribulation includes the destruction of all “false religions,” which include every Christian denomination except for themselves. Witnesses also believe in complementarian roles for men and women, teenagers aren’t allowed to date, homosexuality is considered a sin, divorce is not allowed, they don’t accept blood transfusions, and friendships with non-Witnesses are discouraged.
As you can imagine, for a rebellious teenage kid like Reena Virk, her parents’ religious beliefs were a recipe for disaster. The show depicts her parents as unreasonably strict, going so far as removing the door from her bedroom in response to her behavior, which, of course, only led to more rebellion.
Virk’s religion, immigrant father and race all made her a perfect target for bullying, which seems to have gone on for quite a while before she was killed. In 2017, Godfrey wrote for Vice that Virk’s killing led to a moral panic about out of control teenage girls in Canada, and the show is sensitive to the many ways in which teenage girls can backstab and betray one another.
But as an adaptation of a true story, Under the Bridge also makes some befuddling choices in its transformation from page to screen. As mentioned before, Gladstone’s character doesn’t exist in the book, and a queer plot twist about her and Godfrey seems to have been invented out of thin air. Aside from that, however, show runner Quinn Shepard made some strange choices about how the series portrays Virk’s family’s decision to forgive Warren Glowatski, who seems to have been the sole boy among the pack of girls who killed Virk.
In real life, Glowatski participated in restorative justice programs which led to his meeting Virk’s parents on multiple occasions. Restorative justice, a practice partially rooted in the Mennonite religion along with adaptations of indigenous cultural rituals1, is focused on holding criminals accountable so that they accept responsibility and can work to repair the harm done. This process often includes family members of the victims as well as community members. Forgiveness is the end product of restorative justice, not its beginning.
In the show’s portrayal, however, Virk’s mother visits Glowatski in prison, and simply says something to the effect that her religion requires her to forgive people, so she forgives him. Jehovah’s Witness teaching does encourage them to “forgive quickly”, but not every Jehovah’s Witness practice could exactly be described as forgiving. To this day, they practice shunning, which can go as far as family members refusing to even speak to disfellowshipped Witnesses. Psychologist Rosie Luther writes that shunning can have “severe impacts on individuals’ psychological and social well-being.” Shunning, Luther adds, “keeps the group in control, and self-efficacy is removed from the ostracized individual.”
This attitude is the antithesis of forgiving, but the show depicts Suman Virk, Rena’s mother, being perfectly willing to let Glowatski off the hook for participating in the killing of her child. The series even includes a likely invented scene where Virk’s parents put on a CD by her favorite rapper Biggie Smalls, and smile at the memories of a child they treated with harsh and unforgiving discipline. Sadly, Suman Virk also passed away in 2018, so we’ll likely never know what her internal process was like when she decided to forgive Glowatski.
But Hollywood loves an ending that allows audiences to feel like forgiveness is quick and easy, when, in fact, it is anything but. By portraying forgiveness in such a simplistic way, the series loses the opportunity for a larger conversation about restorative justice, accountability, and the pitfalls of fundamentalist religious belief. It’s a Hollywood ending, but not an honest one.
And restorative justice is the subject of the final chapter of Not So Sorry.