In “The Girl From Plainville,” premiering Tuesday on Hulu, Elle Fanning plays Michelle Carter, who became infamous in 2015 when she was indicted on a charge of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to kill himself.
Michelle and Conrad, called Coco by his family, met in real life on vacation in Florida; they lived not terribly far from each other in Massachusetts but conducted their subsequent relationship remotely, mainly through texts, a flurry of words out of which they built a disastrous bubble.
Notably, text exchanges between Conrad and Michelle are enacted by the characters face to face — in one another’s bedrooms, on a country road at night against a chorus of crickets, on a pier and so on.