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You can hear the calm relief in the voice of one of the cops reporting to a crime call, only to discover a bunch of normal boys and girls enjoying themselves instead of a citable disturbance — he’d rather they all be having a good time instead of “robbing people.” Routinely dispatched to this unassuming street in Marion County, Fla., the officers are invariably charmed by the tight-knit families they find, joking with the kids, commiserating easily with the parents. Their bodycams sensitive to every tiny utterance, they seem to grasp that the real nuisance here is Susan Lorincz, the angry white woman who keeps calling them to complain, not the kids playing football in an adjacent field.
There is little comfort to this reality, though, as Geeta Gandbhirs devastating documentary “The Perfect Neighbor” unfolds, one police visit after another. That’s because a prologue of sirens and sorrow tells us where this is all heading: a summer night in 2023 when Lorincz shot a gun through her locked front door and killed her neighbor, Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four. The experience of watching what leads to it is singularly dread-inducing.
Even as the bodycam footage reveals a supportive community undeserving of persistent disruption — much less preventable catastrophe — this story isn’t easy to absorb. But it’s as essential as movies get, especially if we want a clearer understanding of the matrix of factors threatening our country’s social cohesion, specifically endangering the lives of people of color in states where controversial “stand your ground” statutes exist.
Because while “The Perfect Neighbor” is, on the most visceral level, a documentary horror film built with police footage, it also reveals how a violent tragedy can be unwittingly manifested by unchecked grievance and a law that weaponizes white fear more than it guards anyone’s peace.
Gandbhir, to whom Owens was a beloved family friend, was given access to two years of Marion County Sheriff’s Office’s bodycams and interviews. But rather than use them as flashbacks in a more conventionally assembled retelling, she creates a narrative out of the raw footage, asking you to assess a neighborhood feud with your own eyes, ears and emotional intelligence across half a dozen or so police calls, all initiated by the jittery, exasperated Lorincz. It’s a showdown that we observe over 14 months.
“The Perfect Neighbor” feels like a daring approach in an age when context is in short supply and documentary filmmakers can avail themselves of narration and original interviews to tell the full story. Gandbhir, though, trusts our instincts for clarity, confident that the accumulation of incidents makes the culpability unmistakable. There are visible signals that suggest Lorincz’s unaddressed mental health issues and cops regularly telling the kids and parents how to deal with their difficult neighbor, but never vice versa. What becomes eye-opening is the naivete of law enforcement regularly placating one woman’s dangerous campaign of prejudiced aggression, acting as if nothing worse will come of it in a state that gives terrified citizens the right to use deadly force.
After the killing, when Gandbhir’s lens shifts to interrogation footage mixed with scenes of a broken community’s grief-stricken public protesting, we get more proof of who in our society gets the benefit of the doubt. “The Perfect Neighbor” does leave us with a patiently earned moment of justice. But it’s haunted by the notion that a lethal rage prevailed, that a crime was allowed to happen and an ordinary, trusting American neighborhood — where a loving mom unhesitatingly tells an inquiring cop, “All these kids are mine” — isn’t protectable ground.
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