What Jennifer Did – The Jennifer Pan case, the review of the Netflix crime documentary

A camera that films, the memories of a witness, the editing that stitches together the words, moment after moment. Thanks to the absurdity of the story, which traces a human soul regressing to an animalistic state, a work like What Jennifer Did – The Jennifer Pan casea docu-film available on Netflix, is capable of surprising and capturing the viewer’s gaze, just as the mental elaboration of a diabolical plan captures the lives of others.

What Jennifer Did – The Jennifer Pan case, the story

To open ours review, let’s start from the story: on November 8, 2010 a voice makes the 911 operator’s handset shake. It is a young voice, of a scared girl, who asks for help because three armed men (all black, one with a Jamaican accent and another with dreadlocks) broke into his home in Markham, Ontario, killing his mother and shooting his father. That that story hides a veil of lies is revealed by the title itself, anticipating Jennifer’s complicity and guilt. It won’t be long before the truth emerge. During the interrogation, Jennifer tells a particular version: the three tied Jennifer’s hands tightly behind her back and despite this she managed to call the emergency services. While her mother, Bich Ha, is shot to death and her father, Hann, is injured, she is the only one left surprisingly unharmed. But this is precisely where Jennifer made a mistake: never leave a witness alive, because it will be her father’s story that will frame her, allowing the agents to put the pieces in their place.

The reiteration of evil

What Jennifer Did – The Jennifer Pan case it is a work that thrives on the inability to accept the story told as something real. Although the epilogue is somewhat predictable, thanks to a rather eloquent and anticipatory title, the spectator continues to follow the connection of shots that follow one another, fascinated by the alternation between testimonies and archive materials. From a directorial and purely technical point of view, everything is reiterates the same as what was previously proposed; the canons are presented as the same, without major changes or virtuosic impulses. The direction, the rhythm of the editing, the photography, everything is applied according to the story to be told, they adapt to it, to highlight the internal plots, the pawns moved, the blood shed.

Double screens, double pain

If there is an interesting element in the visual construct called to translate the phases of investigation, interceptions and interrogations that attempt to answer the fateful question “What did Jennifer do?” that is found in the splitting of points of view, of faces enclosed in the screens of video tapes that scroll once again on another screen, like that of astonished spectators, surprised by a further fall of the human race before the power of death. The words return to invest the ears, the gazes to lower, the memories to fill the viewing space, in an eternal cyclicality, as if they were generated by an macabre spell, which the multiplication of screens exacerbatesraising it to second.

The shadow of the past on the terror of the present

What Jennifer Did – The Jennifer Pan case has nothing innovative, other than the story line it intends to pursue. The work it doesn’t aim for surprise, as to how we arrived at such an epilogue and the unveiling of the mysteries. The rest is entrusted to a game of editing and the human element which underline, like many highlighters, the most surprising passages and the most intense implications. Between a cumbersome past, parental expectations that suffocate children incapable of following their own ambitions, and a sentimental bond from which it is impossible to break away, What Jennifer Did promises to dig deep into the truth, getting to the roots of problems, to the germinal seed of a guilty mind. For a work that delves deeply into the looming presence of the past over the shadow of the present, the use of reconstructions or acted moments is reduced to almost zero; after all the false component, reconstructed, is all borne by Jennifer herselfbearer and creator of continuous lies and lies.

She’s there factory of falsehood which will produce a sandcastle ready to be destroyed as soon as the wave of investigations hits it. Yet, in the space of testimonies, of memories shared by those who experienced firsthand the passing of the minutes during the interrogations, a deep abyss of shortcomings opens silently before us. Director Jenny Popplewell tends to focus onsurprise effect, on the modus operandi of an apparently normal girl, forgetting to investigate even more thoroughly the family dynamics that led the girl to dress as death; by dwelling excessively on rather expendable points, another rather engaging aspect from a spectatorial point of view is lost, such as that following the arrest of Jennifer and Danny, such as the trial and the media response to a case that has shocked America today. The viewer now knows what Jennifer did; but floating on the viewing surface are dozens of further unresolved questions, unanswered questions that no one will ever fill.