There Isn't Much to 'What Jennifer Did,' But Netflix Has a Bigger Problem

By Alison Lanier | Film | April 26, 2024 |

By Alison Lanier | Film | April 26, 2024 |

Netflix’s fast-paced true-crime release schedule is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s no way you can release story after story after gruesome story and do it well and so quickly. Like, documentary doesn’t work like that. Documentary feels like too dignified a word, even if technically accurate, for some of these releases, including those like What Jennifer Did, which really emphasize the lack of finesse and care that’s gone into these sensationalized retellings.

What Jennifer Did tells the story of a Canadian murder-for-hire plot, targeting an older Vietnamese-Canadian couple—a plot that unraveled in one horrendous level of heartbreak after another. Jennifer Pan was a twenty-four-year-old woman raised by ambitious and restrictive parents, whom she seemed always to disappoint. One ordinary Monday night, three intruders broke into her family home, where she lived with her parents. Jennifer was tied up; her mother, Bich Ha Pan, was shot dead; and her father, Huei Hann Pan, who was shot in the face, amazingly survived. In a coma, he was taken for medical care — and Jennifer was brought in for interrogation, as a victim.

It’s a fraught story, as the investigation unravels the lies that Jennifer has surrounded herself with over the years, from her boyfriend to her education, culminating in the dramatic revelation of Jennifer’s own complicity. What Jennifer Did becomes a journey of a young-woman-as-victim transformed into a perpetrator.

And the story is told with formulaic stiffness — interrogation footage and talking heads and all the usual mechanical accouterments of a true crime saga. It makes small nods toward moments of possible insight-but none of them land. The story is there for shock value, compiled and shoveled out to stream.

It’s the movie’s bad luck — or Netflix’s bad planning — that led to its release around the same time as Baby Reindeer and Ctrl+Alt+Desire, two vastly different and better approaches to true crime storytelling, both demonstrating a level of care and attention that highlight the absolute dearth of both in What Jennifer Did. What Jennifer Did just seems like it got pasted together and spat out.

Most telling of all is the apparent use of AI in altering or generating images of Jennnifer herself. I can’t say I noticed the AI while watching, but once I saw the photographs isolated online, the mangled hand and elongated fingers seem painfully obvious. How could filmmakers make such a decision, to use AI to depict the subject of their story-especially a practiced true crime director like Jenny Popplewell?

Presumably the filmmakers couldn’t gain access to actual images of Jennnifer — so instead, they generated them. It’s disturbing. They literally crafted her to present the way they wanted to portray her, which in any flavor of documentary is a wildly bad practice. And it’s probably pretty telling about how they treated the rest of the story as they portrayed that to their audience of streaming-platform eyeballs.

AI in true crime feels like a new low of exploitation in a genre that struggles to justify itself against exploitation (or, at least good true crime does). Not to mention that the AI images show Jennifer as we never see her in the actual footage — in a revealing red dress, looking ready to head out to a messy college party. The filmmakers want Jennifer Pan to be a woman with many faces — a woman you can’t trust. And these are the choices they made to do it.

There’s so much to this story that could have been meaningfully explored-about Jennifer’s life, about the Pans’ parenting and their dreams for their daughter, about trying to reinvent your own narrative through any means possible. Lately, for mindless background noise, I’ve been putting Who the F*** Did I Marry?, that old-school bastion of stiff, sexist true crime storytelling. That show feels like a parody of itself — and for good reason, stocked with platitudes and awkward reenactments. Prestige true crime has come lightyears from those early days…Well. I’d say that with more confidence if I hadn’t just watched What Jennifer Did, which seems to handle its subject matter with a similar level of blase shock value.

What Jennifer Did is now streaming on Netflix.