The new documentary “The Perfect Neighbor” (on Netflix) couldn’t exist outside of a surveillance society. But that’s the world we live in. So, using mostly police body-cam footage, along with news imagery and videos from home security cameras and an interrogation room, the director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the story of the 2023 killing of 35-year-old Ajike Owens, a Florida woman who was shot by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, then 58. Owens was Black. Lorincz is white. And after Lorincz’s arrest, sheriff’s deputies found evidence that she had researched Florida’s “stand your ground” statute, which allows residents to use deadly force if they feel threatened on their own property.
It’s a heart-pounding documentary, because we know what happens to Owens from the beginning. For much of the movie, we’re watching the escalation. Owens’s children enjoy playing on property that did not belong to Lorincz but was next to her home. She complains for many months, calling the sheriff over and over again. Because the deputies are wearing body cameras, we get multiple views of their visits along with neighbors’ accounts, as well as Lorincz’s version, which often paints the events in a significantly different light. She represents herself as the victim of unruly and disrespectful children. Eventually, she shoots their mother when Owens goes to confront her.
The point of “The Perfect Neighbor” is to show how devastating and manipulative the effects of “stand your ground” laws can be, giving cover to those whose motives might not, in fact, simply be self-defense. After Owens’s death, Gandbhir shows protesters mourning the loss and questioning law enforcement’s treatment of Lorincz compared with that of Black people in similar situations. And through interrogation-room footage, we listen in on Lorincz’s conversation with the authorities, which involves racial slurs and language clearly lifted from the “stand your ground” law as well as Lorincz’s insistence that trauma from her own childhood sexual abuse caused her to feel afraid. There’s no editorializing here, but we can see just how much of what she’s saying is actually true. (Lorincz was ultimately convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 25 years in prison.)
Having all of this footage makes for an unusually thorough retelling of the crime. In a fiction film, a director often shoots a scene from different angles, with wide and close-up shots, and various characters in the foreground. Here the same effect is accomplished just from the many cameras around. That’s remarkable, especially in true crime, which leans so heavily on recreations, interviews and speculation. In “The Perfect Neighbor,” it’s just footage and eyewitness accounts — but we also become eyewitnesses.
Yet “The Perfect Neighbor” does raise a few ethical issues that, while not precisely the fault of the film, should at least give the audience something to chew on beyond the cruelty of the events and the laws it aims to indict. One is a simple transparency issue: Gandbhir has revealed in interviews that her sister-in-law was best friends with Owens, a connection that probably should be disclosed in the documentary (and may have made for an even stronger film if revealed).
More broadly, though, there’s something queasy and fundamentally weird about all of this footage being available for the whole world to watch. There’s a long history in America of law enforcement video — of people at their worst on their worst days — being put in front of viewers who don’t have a direct interest in the story: Think of “Cops,” or “To Catch a Predator.” Those shows were played for entertainment value (something the excellent new documentary “Predators” explores in detail). “The Perfect Neighbor” is not aiming to be fun.
But a film like this might, in years past, have been seen in the set-apart solemnity of a theater, where audiences would watch together and perhaps discuss afterward. Now it’s on Netflix, where virtually anyone can stream it right at home — a kind of context collapse that reminds us how terrifying it is to live in a world where we are always surveilled. Our worst days, too, could be on anyone’s TV, at any time, in any setting.
And it can be hard to resist the impulse to watch punitively, especially once the perpetrator is in the interrogation room. When someone commits a horrible crime, as Lorincz did, it’s easy to see them as less than human. But satisfying the vindictive impulse does run against the ethical principles traditionally held by documentarians as well as by many activists seeking to change the justice system. It’s harder to redirect the conversation once the film moves into the wider streaming ecosystem.
Of course, this is a systemic issue, not a single-film problem. “The Perfect Neighbor” deserves to be broadly seen, discussed and heeded. But the issues it points out, both in legal terms and in how we live in a world where we are always being watched and recorded, are worth contemplating, too.
