‘What Jennifer Did’ review: a daughter’s deceit, on Netflix

Jenny Popplewell’s documentary recounts the case of Jennifer Pan, a serial liar whose demanding immigrant parents were shot in their home in 2010.

What Jennifer Did is a study in human nature.

There’s very little chance of dropping a spoiler into a review of What Jennifer Did – it is obvious she did something, and the specifics of the outrage become clear right away.

But as concise as this documentary is, it can be defined in a number of profitable ways: a crime thriller, an anatomy of police interrogation techniques, a parenting story and an immigrant fable – one in the classic tradition, rather than one that fits any narratives currently being promoted.

Which doesn’t make it a happy story. Huei Hann and Bich Ha Pan were Vietnamese immigrants to Canada, where both worked at an auto parts manufacturer, lived in a modest suburban home north of Toronto (paid off), and drove expensive cars (which meant nothing, other than to pique investigator interest).

On November 8, 2010, the police, responding to a seemingly hysterical 911 call from their daughter, Jennifer, found mother Bich Ha shot dead, father Huei Hann seriously wounded and Jennifer claiming that a trio of gunmen had staged a home invasion, stolen cash, tied her up and fled.

Among the immediate questions – how did Jennifer call the police while tied up? – are a number of revelations. The Pans – ambitious, hardworking escapees from the Chinese-Vietnamese diaspora – were the stereotypical helicopter-piloting tiger parents.

Among their many other restrictions, they forbade their daughter from seeing her boyfriend, the dubious Daniel Wong, convinced he would distract her from the overachiever’s path she was on, never realising that Jennifer had fabricated not only her high-school grades but her entire college career.

For four years, she travelled into Toronto to attend a school in which she was never enrolled. She simply could not disappoint them.

The Jennifer Pan story, à la director Jenny Popplewell (American Murder: The Family Next Door), is reminiscent of two French dramas of the early 2000s, Laurent Cantet’s Time Out and Nicole Garcia’s The Adversary, both of which were based on the same real-life tale of a fired French businessman who faked going to work every day – a story to which the two films affixed drastically different outcomes.

Jennifer Pan’s fate and those of her parents were of the more dire variety, which a viewer won’t find at all shocking: In a kind of stylistic response to the type of genre film that uses documentary techniques to enhance its terror quotient, Popplewell uses genre-movie conceits to foreshadow the direction of her real-life horror movie.

Even if one knows in advance where the narrative is heading, there’s tension, be it in the family dynamics of the Pans, or the tightrope act that Jennifer tries to execute. What is informative certainly isn’t the notion that oppressing one’s child can be a fatal mistake.

It is the witnessing, through an abundance of closed-circuit footage, of Jennifer’s questioning and her account of a wobbly story, of a lie coming unwound, and through calculated interrogation techniques.

Canadian police can lie to a suspect, we are told, almost apologetically, by the detectives interviewed, and what they tell her is close to fantastic.

But What Jennifer Did is a study in human nature: she might have succumbed to the darkest of impulses, but confession is good – no, necessary – even for the most twisted of souls.

What Jennifer Did is streaming on Netflix.