‘The Perfect Neighbor’ Review: A Devastatingly Powerful Documentary Takes Aim at America’s Stand-Your-Ground Laws
Broadly speaking, there are two obvious ways to make a documentary about the dangers posed — and the damage already done — by the “stand-your-ground” laws that Florida has popularized since adopting a version of its own in 2005.
The first would be a top-down, macro-political approach that examined the pitfalls of applying the castle doctrine to a racially stratified country with more guns than people. It would start with the fact that homicide rates have increased eight percent in states where citizens have no duty to retreat before using deadly force in response to a perceived threat against their lives, and from there it would isolate a variety of examples in order to illustrate that 70 percent of the people killed in Florida’s stand-your-ground cases have been unarmed. That 79 percent of their killers could have retreated safely. That white-on-Black homicides are five times more likely to be deemed “justifiable” than the reverse. (Data pulled from the Rockefeller Institute of Government.) Such a film would offering a sobering — if largely analytical — reminder of what its self-selecting audience already suspected about these laws.
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It would be an understatement to say that Geeta Gandbhir’s “The Perfect Neighbor” takes the other approach, just as it would be an understatement to say the film takes that approach to upsetting extremes. Shot almost entirely by police body cams and interrogation room CCTVs, Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary crystallizes the horrors of stand-your-ground laws by examining their effects through the lens of a single case — one that harrowingly illustrates the defects of castle doctrines (among other policy failures) by painting a microcosmic portrait of white America’s inability to parse between fear and anger.
Stand-your-ground laws aren’t even mentioned by name until the movie is more than half over, as Gandbhir elects to work the issue from the inside out, with the you-are-there reality of the footage she uses bringing viewers right into the heart of what’s ultimately a human matter. Indeed, a subjective camera has seldom been more damning than it is here — here, in an American horror story that doesn’t hinge on whether or not Susan Lorincz was actually in danger when she fired on the unarmed neighbor knocking at her front door, but rather on whether or not Susan Lorincz believed she was in danger when the young Black mother from across the street came to retrieve her son’s confiscated tablet.
In a country where the most powerful group of people has been made to feel permanently unsafe, everyone else has good reason to fear for their lives. And that fear is only legitimized further by laws that allow fear itself to be a credible excuse for murder. Everybody in Lorincz’s quiet Ocala neighborhood knew that she was frightened of the world outside her door, but they didn’t realize how scared they should have been in return. Most of them just thought of the 60-year-old doctor — a doctor of what? — as a local nuisance. The kids who played football on the communal patch of grass in front of her house called her a “Karen,” to which Lorincz often responded by calling the cops.
That so much of the film’s backstory can be gleaned from police body cam footage is a testament to how frequently Lorincz harangued the authorities. She was incensed by the sound of young people having fun on languid summer afternoons, and while viewers will understandably brace for the cops to side with the irritated white lady over the group of high-spirited Black kids, it only takes a few noise complaints for the police to identify Lorincz as “a psycho.”
Maybe the authorities would have taken more aggressive measures if the shoe was on the other foot. Maybe the police would have asked if she owned a weapon after it came out that she experienced violent panic attacks as the result of her sexual trauma. Maybe the people across the street would have been more on-guard if it wasn’t so common for the Susan Lorinczs of the world to call little kids the n-word just for playing too close to her truck.
Beaming with remarkable grace, Ajike Owens all but laughs away the cops the first time we see them ask the mother of four about the woman across the street. Yes, she threw Lorincz’s “no trespassing” sign in her neighbor’s general direction (Lorincz reacts like it was an assassination attempt), but the sign wasn’t even on Lorincz’s property to begin with. She knew that Lorincz wasn’t in any real danger from her or her kids or from anyone else on their street, and she assumed that — in spite of her neighbor’s racist shrieking — the opposite was broadly true as well. But Lorincz didn’t see things the same way in her addled mind, and on the night of June 2, 2023, she killed Owens for the crime of knocking on her front door.
We see the news of Owens’ death spread through her community in body cam footage recorded by the cops who arrived on the scene; the immediate fallout from this eminently preventable tragedy is filtered through the same legal apparatus that allowed it to happen in the first place. The camera is at once both objective and subjective — coldly unblinking but oriented entirely around human attention and movement.
The callous indifference that’s coded into the body cam aesthetic collides with the intimate proximity of watching an officer tell the father of Owens’ children that she’s gone, and then listening (from just a few inches away) as the man relays that message to his newly motherless kids. The disparity between what the law permits from some and deprives of others has seldom been rendered as devastatingly as it is here. “Are you hurt?,” a police officer asks one of Owens’ sons. “No,” he cries, “but my heart is broken.”
“The Perfect Neighbor” pivots from heartbreak to absurdity — to and the outrage that attends it — as it shifts to focus on the aftermath of the murder, Gandbhir’s perspective widening from body cams to the surveillance footage captured in the interrogation room at the Ocala police station. It’s chilling to watch Lorincz sit with the horror of what she’s done; to watch her exaggerate the threat Owens presented, downplay the vitriol of her own racism, and grossly misconstrue the timeline of events that led up to the murder. It’s even more chilling to watch the detectives let her go free later the same night, even though we understand that her case has only just begun.
To some degree, Lorincz’s case is too specific to function as a perfect synecdoche for the 79 percent of Florida’s stand-your-ground killings in which the assailant could have safely retreated. The situation had been brewing for months on end, and Lorincz was clearly suffering from a form of PTSD. But therein lies the power of Gandbhir’s decision to examine stand-your-ground laws through a pinhole: Every crime has its own mess of extenuating circumstances, yet all of them feel justified in the heat of the moment. To encourage citizens to be the gun-toting arbiters of their own reality is to weaponize — all too literally — the most dangerous biases they foster on an everyday basis. It’s bad enough that we allow the police to do that, but it might be even worse to grant that power to someone who likes to think of themselves as the perfect neighbor.
Grade: B+
“The Perfect Neighbor” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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