Reel Rundown: ‘What Jennifer Did’ gives view into dark recesses of mind of woman who resorted to murder of parents
America, it appears, is obsessed with crime. Or, at least, with true-crime programming
A 2022 poll by the public opinion and data company YouGov indicated that half of Americans enjoy true-crime content. Furthermore, one in three said that they devoured something related to true crime at least once a week.
Patricia Bryan, a professor emerita from the University of North Carolina Law School, has an opinion as to why this is. Co-author of the nonfiction book “Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland,” Bryan says it has to do with a confluence of what she describes as “escapism and entertainment.”
“It speaks to why people go into haunted houses or ride a roller coaster,” she said in an interview with her university’s magazine. “There’s something about facing danger when it’s not real, it’s not personal. People like to be scared or like to see the dark recesses of someone’s mind.”
That may explain why one of the highest-rated movies streaming on Netflix now is the documentary “What Jennifer Did.” Written and directed by Jenny Popplewell, the film tells the story of a 2010 murder that occurred in a Toronto suburb.
Jennifer Pan is the daughter of a Vietnamese couple who had immigrated to Canada. But while the couple, mother Bich Ha Pan and father Huei Hann Pan, had adapted to a middle-class Canadian lifestyle, they retained a strict Vietnamese attitude toward parenting.
Jennifer’s parents demanded excellence from her, and they controlled every aspect of her life, not allowing her to date or even attend parties all through high school. She had some musical talent, as her piano teacher Fernando Baldassini explains, but she fell short of her parents’ expectations in other areas. And over the years, she found ways to fool them into thinking that she was achieving what they expected of her.
Yet all this, and more, would come to light only gradually. And only after the night that she called emergency services in a panic, claiming that someone had broken into the house, tied her up and shot her parents.
With Jennifer’s mother dead and her father seriously wounded and in a coma, the police had little to go on but the young woman’s testimony. Investigators began to question her story, though, and their suspicions were confirmed when dad woke up.
Director Popplewell reveals all this slowly, even if her film’s title gives away who did what from the beginning.
Watching investigators slowly break down Jennifer’s story, confronting her with one contradiction after the next, isn’t that much different from watching what plays out each week on such fictional shows as “Law & Order” or “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
Still, while the who, what, where and how aspects of the crime eventually are solved, Popplewell never truly gets to the heart of why. Yes, Jennifer Pan was controlled and manipulated, maybe even abused.
The fact is many children grow up in similar if not worse circumstances. Yet, few of them resort to murder.
Entertaining as it can be, maybe delving into the recesses of some minds is just too daunting a task for us to easily understand.