The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

Rated R because this is about a real murder.  While there isn't any gore in the film (that I remember), the entire thing is pretty brutal. This is a movie that addresses racial tensions, coupled with the tensions that come from class differences.  There is a solid amount of language and the movie is meant to make you mad.  Still, if you are worried about seeing visual things, that part is the only thing that is pretty tame.  But if you have any degree of imagination, maybe go in with caution.  

DIRECTOR: Geeta Gandbhir

Oh man, these things are getting harder to write.  Again, if I can knock this one out by the end of the day, I can get caught up to where I'm supposed to be.  (Assuming I didn't forget to write about one somewhere along the way.)   This one is a weird one because it absolutely does not feel like an Academy Award nominee.  Not to say it is bad, by any means.  But this feels like your standard Netflix True Crime doc as opposed to anything beyond what is obvious.  The thing is, there is something incredibly important about watching The Perfect Neighbor.  It's almost like this is one of those situations where someone is taking their medication because it's baked into the pie.

Because I don't really know how I want to approach this yet, I want to say the obvious thing.  As much as this is an interesting true crime story about how Susan Lorincz killed Ajike Owens, this is fundamentally about racial justification for murder coupled with the dangerous precedent about the Stand Your Ground laws in Florida.  But I had a conversation with a student who saw this movie as well and the Stand Your Ground thing didn't even really come into play.  Honestly, as a true crime doc, it works better than a movie with a message.  That's no good for me.  I want it the other way around.  I want this to be a story about the Stand Your Ground laws that happens to be interesting to watch.  The Stand Your Ground thing is definitely an afterthought.  That conversation doesn't really show up until the last half-hour.  And while it is important to how things play out for Susan Lorincz, it reads as an afterthought to the whole story.

There's also an unintended consequence for how the film is presented.  This is a story about Ajike Owens, a mother of four, who was standing up for her kids after Lorincz harassed them for years.  But Ajike Owens is almost the "surprise" of the movie, and that seems wildly inappropriate.  Her death was a massive tragedy.  It brought a community out to memorialize her.  Like, that was so much more important.  Okay, I'm dancing back and forth over this.  Here's me, trying to learn as much as I can about communities and how that they have suffered.  But I couldn't point out Ajike Owens's name out as it stared me right in the face.  Heck, I knew that this story ended in a murder.  I even kind of guessed that it was Owens who would be killed by Lorincz.  But my brain never put two-and-two together that this was national news.  No, in my mind, this was a small story that never made the circuit.  And would I have been invested in this story had it not been marketed as a true crime documentary?  Probably not.  There's so much misery out there and some of it is going to fall through the cracks.

Before I get too overwhelmed by side thoughts, I do really like how this documentary is formatted.  Ultimately, this is almost a found-footage doc compiled mostly of police body cams.  One of the key conceits in the film is that Susan Lorincz is a miserable human being.  I do suspect that there's mental health issues, but I also don't want to diminish how terrible of a person she actually is.  She's the kind of person who has swallowed this narrative that her rights are way more important than anyone else's rights.  She, on a dime, will call the police on children who aren't doing anything illegal.  By having the story told by the body cams, we're reminded how much she's abusing that 9-1-1 call by having these officers come out monthly to complain about kids playing football on a neighbor's yard.  I'm trying to at least relate to Lorincz (even though I really don't and don't really want to).  Do I find neighbors' behavior annoying?  Honestly, not really.  I had an annoying neighbor once.  But I always think that the squeaky wheel neighbor is always way more toxic than a live-and-let-live neighbor.  The one phrase that is repeated all the way through the piece is "They're just kids."  Yeah, they are just kids.  I don't even like football, but I'm glad that these kids are playing football rather than sitting inside watching TV...like my kids tend to do.

The messed up part of me wants to know everything that there is about Susan Lorincz.  I think we're all reading mental illness.  But the fact that I want to make that deep dive into what would make Susan Lorincz the way she is might be completely inappropriate.  Lorincz is the product of disappointment in the American Dream.  She has been told her entire life that she could be anything that she wants.  She was told by people in government that her right to bear arms was to protect her from all of the minorities out there and she created these fantasies in her head about defending herself from the savages outside her door.  There's a scene that almost makes the movie really worth watching.  When the film doesn't use bodycam footage, it uses CCTV footage to fill in those gaps.  At one point, towards the end of the story, Susan Lorincz is being interrogated for a second time.  In that narrative, she constructs this detailed breakdown of all the events that led her to shoot Ajike Owens.  There's a phone call to 9-1-1 and, according to Lorincz, Ajike Owens started breaking down the door.   In reality, we know this to be untrue because there's only two minutes between the phone call that Lorincz is worried about what might happen and the killing of Ajike Owens.  She was waiting to shoot her.  She wanted to shoot her.  She wanted to show that she wasn't someone who was pushed around and that all came from the narrative that she heard that poor people and Black people wanted to kill her.

And the really crazy thing is that I really believe that Lorincz probably believed the yarn that she was spinning. In every scene you see her, there's this victim mentality.  There's no moustache twirling.  It's just this lady who doesn't understand why she is the one in police captivity.  There's a damning moment at the end of that second interview.  She is given an opportunity to write a letter to the kids of Ajike Owens.  Instead, Lorincz doubles down and insists that their mother was trying to kill her, just so the police read that note.  But the piece de resistance is that she just refused to go with the police to the holding cell.  If there was a greater commentary on how a certain class is privileged, it's in that moment where an older White lady, after being arrested, refused to move for police officers and the officers had to beg her to go is a telling tale of the separate police states we have.

As a message about Stand Your Ground, it's definitely there.  I don't think that it hits as hard as it could, especially considering that Lorincz is found guilty of manslaughter.  But as a memorial for Ajike Owens, it at least is a good start.