‘The Perfect Neighbor’ Review: A Revolutionary Doc, Made From Bodycam Footage, Takes Us Inside an Avoidable Tragedy
Who among us, when we were young, did not annoy the cranky old geezer down the street? In some cases, you couldn’t help it, as there are some people who simply aren’t made for suburban living, terrifying the neighborhood kids by growling “Get off my lawn!” any time an oblivious child stepped foot on their precious property. In so doing, they made themselves targets when it came time to toilet-paper someone’s house or ding-dong ditch. No one dreamed the witch next door would make good on her threats.
Director Geeta Gandbhir’s ironically titled “The Perfect Neighbor” focuses on the shocking case of one such grouch, Florida woman Susan Lorincz, who went all Clint Eastwood on a trespasser. That’s a flippant way to describe a real-life tragedy, which resulted in the death of African American single mom Ajike “AJ” Owens, but movies have a way of endorsing violent solutions. This one doesn’t, shifting its allegiances to a community protest by locals disturbed that the bewildered white shooter wasn’t tried the way a Black person would have been.
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Both formally innovative and philosophically necessary, Gandbhir’s tense true-crime documentary reconstructs this one dispute — from the very first 911 call to the final courtroom verdict — almost entirely from official footage, most of it taken from police bodycams. The resulting thriller unfolds like a cross between “Paranormal Activity” and “End of Watch,” leaving audiences free to draw their own conclusions from the on-camera evidence. (The availability of such material stands to revolutionize true-crime filmmaking, also factoring into the Oscar-nominated, New Yorker-produced doc short “Incident.”)
However unfair, self-defense and “stand your ground” laws have long been used to exonerate killers whose deep-seated (and often unexamined) racism devalues the lives of victims they deem fearsome or inferior. That’s one of the many subtexts that rises to the surface in this emotional and thought-provoking social experiment from the Emmy-winning director of “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power,” whose film doubles as a litmus test to audiences’ own biases.
Among its many layers, Gandbhir’s fascinating project is also a surprisingly relatable look at irreconcilable differences between neighbors — a situation frequently addressed on trashy daytime TV, but seldom depicted in respectable movies. Such conflicts rarely work themselves out, and can often escalate to vindictive and even fatal ends (my partner once had his car’s brake lines cut by the guy next door, who was illegally operating a noisy auto-repair shop out of his garage).
The irony here is that it was Lorincz — the potentially dangerous party — who was constantly calling 911. The police first respond in February 2022, coming out to interview various neighbors after Lorincz accuses Owens of throwing a “no trespassing” sign at her. Breaking from traditional doc techniques, Gandbhir doesn’t conduct fresh interviews or attempt to re-create the incident, but instead uses the officers’ bodycam footage to present the situation. “That lady is always messing with people’s kids,” says one neighbor, pointing to the open lot where Black and white children like to horse around, to their work-from-home neighbor’s extreme annoyance. “She bossy,” says a little girl, identifying Lorincz as an angry “Karen.”
Sociologically speaking, the Karen phenomenon — whereby white women use their social position and privilege to dictate and demand how others behave — can be tricky to pin down, since it plays on invisible dynamics. It’s been well established that Black Americans are at much greater risk of being accidentally (or even deliberately) shot and killed by police officers. Did Lorincz realize, every time she called 911, that she was potentially endangering her neighbors’ lives? Is it possible that she was counting on it? The weaponization of the police by certain citizens remains one of the unspoken ways this institution can be used to enforce not just the law, but also the vestiges of white supremacy.
What we can’t know from “The Perfect Neighbor” is what exactly was going through Lorincz’s head when the local children got too noisy for her to concentrate. Interrogations from separate police visits indicate that she shouted the N-word and other epithets at her tiny tormentors. But then, footage from her own surveillance cameras shows the kids deliberately taunting her, shaking their butts in her direction.
None of this is eye-witnessed by the cops, whose every word is recorded (including choice ones to describe Lorincz, who comes across as a far greater nuisance than her neighbors). With every call, by the time the police arrive, the offending behavior has settled down — not that any of it could possibly justify what ultimately happened, when Lorincz introduced a firearm into the equation.
This is the trickiest part for Gandbhir to reconstruct, since the shooting occurs off-camera, although the director does use audio from what appears to be a doorbell camera recording from across the street to give audiences a sense of the confrontation — far different from the life-and-death scenario Lorincz describes.
Sadly, there’s no easy solution for such a disagreement. Still, one has to wonder why this irritable home-renter — who claims a right to the “peaceful, quiet enjoyment of your property” — ever thought to involve the police in the first place. That, plus the role of guns in her response, should give audiences plenty to discuss and debate. Meanwhile, the bodycam footage reveals Lorincz’s most insidious tool: the way she misrepresented the situation and tried to manipulate the authority figures when they arrived. For all the criticism of police in our culture lately, they come off looking like the good guys here. If only Owens had been the one to call them that fateful night, maybe things would have turned out differently.
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