What Jennifer Did Netflix Review: A Hollow Retelling of a Chilling Crime

Netflix | 1 Episode | 2024

Rating: 2 out of 5 – All the intrigue of a Wikipedia page read aloud, minus the effort it takes to scroll.

First Impressions: Déjà Vu or Just Dull?

There’s a certain irony to rewatching a true crime documentary you’ve already seen and realizing you remember absolutely nothing about it. Not a face, not a quote, not even a half-baked reenactment. Just a faint impression of the case and the creeping suspicion that either the doc was forgettable, or your brain hit the delete key out of sheer self-preservation.

This "What Jennifer Did" Netflix review was never supposed to happen. I planned to make things easy by rewatching something I’d already seen. Instead, I found myself questioning how I forgot everything, only to realize the doc hadn’t given me much to remember. Now, my memory isn’t exactly a steel trap these days. It’s more like a colander (some things stick, most things leak through). So when I decided to give this particular documentary a second shot, it wasn’t out of curiosity. It was survival. I’ve got several shows on deck, a body in chronic pain, and a to-do list that just laughs at me. Rewatching something I’d already logged should’ve made things easier. Spoiler: it didn’t.

I curled up in bed with my tablet, keyboard balanced awkwardly, ready to jot down notes. Five minutes in, I was checking the runtime. Ten minutes in, I was considering folding laundry instead. That’s how dull it was. And considering laundry is basically cardio when you’ve got chronic illness… that says a lot.

The Crime: A Case Too Familiar

On the night of November 8, 2010, a 911 call crackled through dispatch, reporting a home invasion in Unionville, a quiet, middle-class suburb just outside Toronto. The caller? Twenty-four-year-old Jennifer Pan, daughter of the homeowners, Hann and Bich Pan, Vietnamese immigrants who had built their lives from the ground up with discipline, sacrifice, and strict expectations.

Jennifer told the operator that intruders had broken into the house, tied her up, robbed them, and shot both her parents. By the time police arrived, the scene confirmed her horror story, at least on the surface. The home bore the marks of chaos. Inside, Bich Pan lay dead. Hann had been shot in the face but, against all odds, was clinging to life. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.

Jennifer, distraught but unharmed, was taken to the station for questioning. The police, assuming armed strangers had shattered this peaceful family home, began looking for a motive and suspects.

Spoilers possible from this point.

But here’s the thing: if you’ve even glanced at the title of the documentary, What Jennifer Did, you already know we’re not heading toward a story of strangers in the night. We’re heading into something colder. Calculated. And far closer to home.

Formatting & Presentation: Where’s the Substance?

The documentary leans heavily on police interrogation footage, with occasional interview clips scattered like breadcrumbs between the tension. Each new segment begins with a moody shot of an empty hallway, the kind that says, “Nothing good happens past this point.” Alongside it, we get a timestamp and a helpful note reminding us how many days have passed since the home invasion. Now, I’ll give credit where it’s due: the “days since” counter is appreciated. I don’t want to keep a calendar open just to follow a crime doc. If I wanted homework, I’d go back to college.

But then we run into an old enemy: lazy labeling. Interviewees are blessed with nameplates and titles, briefly, tantalizingly, for about three seconds. One and done. Doesn’t matter if they pop up ten more times with crucial information. You better have caught their name and relationship to the story the first time, or you’re on your own, friend. Hope you’ve got a photographic memory and the reading speed of a caffeinated court stenographer.

Where’s the Humanity?

Everyone interviewed in What Jennifer Did had a reason to be there. They either knew the family or carried a badge, and their insights were relevant, even valuable. But relevance doesn’t equal resonance. What this documentary sorely lacked was depth. Background. Humanity. A reason to care beyond, “Hey, this happened.”

I don’t just want the what. I want the who. A headline that reads “Woman killed by bear” earns a raised eyebrow and a shrug. But tell me she was a beloved teacher who made clothes for underprivileged kids, and suddenly I’m picturing the ripple effects: empty desks, quiet homes, and a clothing drive I might actually donate to. That’s the difference between a story and a statistic.

This documentary didn’t give us that difference. Bich Pan, we’re told, was a hard-working immigrant who enjoyed line dancing. Hann Pan? Also a hard-working immigrant. Jennifer? A piano prodigy turned mediocre student. And that’s... pretty much the biography. The show recycles the same handful of family photos like it's running low on printer ink and offers only one interview with a family friend who delivers a vague statement about their loyalty and friendship, while stock footage of a dinner table plays, as if that somehow fills in the emotional blanks.

Jennifer’s school friend talks about academic pressure in immigrant households and what a poor student Jennifer was (true, important) but even he sounds unsure if he ever actually liked her. And then... that’s it. Curtain call. Were there no other friends willing to speak? Did the family have no photo albums? Or did the filmmakers simply not dig deeper?

Whatever the reason, the result is a hollow echo where real people should’ve stood. If you're going to spend 90 minutes on a case, you owe it to the people involved to do your homework. Otherwise, you're not honoring them, you're just using them.

Missing Pieces: No Map, No Meaning

Another gaping hole? No layout of the house. You’d think, in a documentary built around a home invasion, someone might have thought to include a floorplan. A simple graphic. A sketch on a napkin with a crayon. Something.

Instead, we’re left to patch it together from scattered quotes. “Jennifer was tied to the banister upstairs.” “Her parents were downstairs.” Cool. But where, exactly? Which room? How far apart? Were they in shouting distance? Line of sight? We’re forced to fill in the blanks with mental duct tape and guesswork.

A labeled diagram would’ve grounded the narrative in space and added clarity to what happened and when. Instead, the editors relied on stock footage and slow pans of random crime scene photos, none of which were labeled. Was that couch the one from the family room? Was it blood? Whose blood was it? Who knows? A simple visual aid would’ve added context. A tour of the actual home, narrated by law enforcement, would’ve added clarity. Instead, we got... nothing.

Ethics, Emotion, and Effort (Or Lack Thereof)

There’s a word that keeps coming up when I think about this doc: lazy. Not underfunded. Not minimalist. Lazy. When you're working with real people, real lives, and real consequences, laziness isn’t just an aesthetic problem, it’s an ethical one.

The filmmakers hint at the pressures Jennifer faced as the only child of immigrant parents, but never give us enough information to evaluate it. Maybe her parents just wanted her to go to college and not date a drug dealer (hardly a shocking ask). Without more detail, it’s impossible to say. And the documentary doesn’t even try.

Props to the detectives for solving the case, but even their timeline felt like it was moving through molasses. Fourteen days to subpoena Jennifer’s phone? If she were a criminal mastermind, that digital trail would've been wiped cleaner than the crime scene.

And the ending? Blink and you’ll miss it. The jail sentences flash on screen like they're trying to outrun your attention span. No recap, no reflection, just a “wrap it up” energy that left me reaching for Wikipedia. Honestly, it felt like the filmmakers did the same, skipped the details, skimmed the surface, and hoped you'd be too bored to notice.

What Jennifer Did Netflix Review: Why This True Crime Story Falls Flat

Let’s talk about what this documentary didn’t do, because frankly, that list is louder than anything it managed to say.

• Tone: Neutral to the point of flatlining. No narration. No emotional thread. Whatever music was used? Forgettable.

• Reenactments: None. And that’s fine. But stock footage of food and shadows didn’t exactly elevate anything.

• Structure: Linear. Neat. Day 1, Day 3, and so on. Functional, but lifeless. No tension. No buildup.

• Ending: No courtroom. No justice arc. Just a fade to black and a few sentences that zipped past like closing credits on fast-forward.

• Emotional Impact: Nonexistent. The title spoiled the story from the start, and the film never gave us a reason to stay invested.

• Experts: Zero. No psychologists, criminologists, or cultural experts. Just one police victim advocate reacting in real time; not analysis, just vibes.

• Justification: No new footage, no new angles, no fresh reason for telling this story now.

• One final omission that left me blinking at the screen (I just discovered as I was writing this): Jennifer Pan had a brother. A whole, living, breathing sibling, and the documentary doesn’t mention him. Not once. Not even in passing. You’d think, in a story that hinges on the family dynamic and cultural pressure, the presence of another child might be… I don’t know, relevant? Was he estranged? Shielded? Interviewed and cut in editing? Did he decline to be part of it? I have no idea, because the documentary doesn’t offer a whisper of his existence. And that silence speaks volumes, about the filmmakers’ priorities, and about how shallow their approach to this family's story really was.

• And while we’re on the topic of missed opportunities: imagine how powerful it would’ve been to hear from Jennifer herself. Even a letter. A phone interview. A prison statement. Something. If the documentary is called What Jennifer Did, then maybe, just maybe, we should hear Jennifer say anything at all. Instead, the film builds an entire narrative around her without giving her a voice. That’s not analysis. That’s echo-chamber storytelling.

Final Verdict: 2 out of 5 Stars

• Shallow character work: I never got a reason to care about anyone on-screen.

• Lazy visuals: Endless recycled photographs and stock footage instead of a single useful diagram or photo spread.

• Pacing drift: 90 minutes that feel like a padded hour.

  
  

This “nothing-burger” of a documentary could have been a longform article. Instead, it ate up 90 minutes of my life and gave me nothing but questions Wikipedia answered better.

Case closed.🔍 Verdict delivered. ⚖️

Stay hydrated.💧 Don’t confuse a shocking case with a well-told story.🧩🗯️

🕵️‍♀️The Emerald Sleuth, calling it a night. 💚