
As a viewer, and even more so as a participant, it is rather difficult to sit through a true crime docuseries without forming thoughts of one’s own and making attempts to establish the facts. In the new film by Netflix What Jennifer Did, a teenage girl’s mother and father are both murdered by robbers and she appears to be quite distressed by this event. However, in due time it turns out that she has some shady dealings and rather shamefully, has constructed so many dubious narratives about herself that it is quite hard, for a time, to watch the film as an amateur detective and try to figure out her role in all of these. Jennifer Said is an extraordinary tale which, one doubts will be remembered among the great true crime films of all time, but certainly it is a new addition worth watching.
The Gist This time, Jennifer Pan was a young woman still living together with her parents in Markham, Ontario, Canada when criminals were alleged to have entered the house looking to rob the family. The incident resulted in her mother getting killed while her father ended up in coma. What Jennifer Did takes off in the hours right after the crime as Jennifer filed her own testimony and went to the police where she accused three black men of having beaten up her parents and ransacked their house. And the days and weeks: that we after.
It is, however, gratifying to know that Ms. Wong’s tale is compelling when in ‘Jennifer’s testimony’ she accounted how her hands were tied up and that she could hear her parents crying for mercy while she was anchored to the railing. Unfortunately for Jennifer, her story started to unravel when El Dany Wong, her boyfriend at the time was ultimately interrogated by the cops. As much as they were in love with her for six years, Danny was hated by her parents who said he was not worthy of Jennifer and so they opted for secrecy. Apart from her ex-boyfriend even so most of Jennifer’s family members were presented as extremely controlling and oppressive, as they took away her phone and car privileges, even when she was already a graduate and above eighteen years. Ultimately as a result of the poor relationship between Jennifer and her parents, she was living a double life.
The Pans were so overbearing and had such lofty ambitions of Jennifer who wanted to be a pharmacist that when she did not get admitted to college she lied saying that she got in. Essentially, Jennifer made a charade out of the situation making her parents drop her off for “college” every day for four years, and later crafting a fake diploma to show to them. The moment authorities got a whiff of Jennifer’s propensity to distort facts utterly, she became the primary suspect, a young woman whose web of falsehoods is so elaborate, she has been driven to take drastic measures to escape it all.
Do not forget, only one person, Jennifer’s mother, was murdered, and her father was at the brink of death. There are several inconsistencies in Jennifer’s account of events on the nine-day occasion when police interrogated her. Then, the moment her father regains consciousness in the most bizarre twist of events, he starts talking about Jennifer to the police saying “Find out what Jennifer did.” And right there and then, things start to make sense. So, this is how a smart manipulator like this old woman got people to do her dirty work for her resulting in her mother getting killed without any risk to herself at all.
What other shows might it remind you of? In addition to reenactments like Jinx’s on camera confession, compelling narrating stories feature a sociopathic suspect who gets away with the gullible audience as the case cast in The Staircase, or the premeditated murder of poor white boys pinned on a Negro in Murder In Boston Roots, Rampage & Reckoning film. What Jennifer Did has all three, and while it doesn’t depend on any of them as the main point, it certainly provokes the audience wondering if there is anything about Jennifer that one can actually accept as true.
Take a look at our thoughts How does one person just one go throughout life being so deceptive, all the while completely fooling those members that are around them? More than anything, that’s the issue at the center of What Jennifer Did. During the film’s 85-minute runtime, Jennifer Pan ends up being an individual who is initially a victim, as her parents go through an irrevocable traumatic experience that is both savage and brutal only to later become a perpetrator of this wretched act, and as we witness the events of her life, it is revealed that the only truth about her was the fact that she had lived a life entirely fictitious.
It is difficult not to feel pity for a child who doesn’t even live their own life, instead trapped in a cage nurtured from the world and at the same time burdened by the dreams of others. But any sympathy we had for Jennifer was regrettably short-lived as she cautiously disclosed in taped witness details how she continued to lie to her parents for ages until her religion forbade her to do so anymore, where she hid everything about her drug dealing boyfriend Danny, and faked a college degree. Together with testimony from Danny and other people related to Jennifer, it follows the pattern of fraud and violence inflicted by a woman who, no one would ever consider was clever in the academics, but absolutely was cunning and deceitful. Jennifer’s re-occurring cycle of deceit was carried over in her statement, first as it comes out that her family was targeted like victims at random by 20 members of one race, black, then she claims the intention was to hire 3 men to kill her, not her parents and it went wrong it becomes a self kill for hire. In the end the collective lie, or at least how it is believed to be the truth is that it was Jennifer who planned the murders so that she was finally together with Danny.
And although that is the most likely of her reasons, based on the woman’s consistent lying, it is still unclear.
Even with all the policies the film has, some issues are such that one would expect more details to be available about them. Jennifer’s father who is a comatose witness, hibernating all this time, was now a talking head and a very small one at that as far as the whole narrative is concerned. It would have been interesting to listen to him more. (Also Jennifer has a brother, but his name is not even mentioned in the film). And a number of the authentic details of Jennifer’s life, the fact that she managed to deceive her own friends in a number of ways, are in fact never presented. Despite the fact that the film’s conciseness still tends to let viewers grasp the important points of the case, the impression that there was much more to the story than was actually told persists.
Parting Shot: The Last Golf Stroke gives an update on Jennifer and her fellow killers where she is serving a life sentence and still fighting her case on appeal just as her parent’s killers and Jennifer’s father were faces apprehended with an everlasting non contact order against his daughter.
Memorable Dialogue: “You gotta be shittin me,” a lead investigator on the case, Detective Bill Courtice delivered this to camera regarding his excitement to learn about Jennifer’s elaborate history of lies.
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