The Perfect Neighbor Review | An Unflinching Indictment of “Stand Your Ground” America

Directed and produced by Geeta Gandbhir, The Perfect Neighbor on Netflix is a gut-wrenchingly harrowing watch. The film, which recently swept five awards at the 10^th Critics Choice Documentary Awards, earns every accolade. Gandbhir resists sensational reconstruction or heavy-handed editorialising and uses real footage to let Susan Lorincz’s own words incriminate her.

On June 2, 2023, 35-year-old Ajike “A.J.” Owens was shot dead by her white neighbour, 58-year-old Lorincz, in Ocala, Florida. Lorincz fired a single bullet through her locked metal door. Owens was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital.

Using a trove of police bodycams, 911 calls, and interrogation-room footage, Gandbhir traces the years-long chain of warnings that preceded the racially-motivated killing of a mother of four. The exclusive use of legal footage—without talking heads or a guiding voiceover—denies the audience the comfort of cinematic distance, leaving us alone with the raw, unmediated horror of what the system recorded, yet failed to prevent.

For Gandbhir, the story was close to home. Owens had been her sister-in-law’s best friend. Fearing that Lorincz would attempt to shield herself behind the “Stand Your Ground” statute, Gandbhir and her partner and co-producer, Nikon Kwantu, went to Florida almost immediately, camera in hand, to begin chronicling the case in real time. Florida is one of thirty-eight U.S. states with “Stand Your Ground” laws—statutes that justify the use of deadly force if a person believes they are in imminent danger.

The story unfolds chronologically and meticulously, beginning more than two years before the fatal shooting, in January 2021. To a world accustomed to witnessing America’s deadly dealings with racial inequality and gun violence, what came to occur seemed inevitable. But what emerges in the documentary is a portrait not of a sudden eruption of violence, but of long-simmering hostility repeatedly reported, documented, and mishandled as a trivial tiff between neighbours.

Deputies from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office had responded to several calls and complaints involving Lorincz and Owens’ households before the killing. The documentary walks viewers through these encounters with relentless clarity. One of the earliest footages we see involves an escalation between Lorincz and Owens as early as February 2022. From there on we see Lorincz lodging complaint after complaint—claims of trespass, harassment, noise, threats—directed at the children in the mixed and mostly low-income neighbourhood.

According to the arrest affidavit, Lorincz even admitted to calling the children racial slurs, including the N-word and “Black slaves”, a detail that sharply colours the interpretation of her subsequent actions. Her racism was explicit and recurred across months. What if someone had recognised the racial hostility for what it was?

One thing the documentary does stunningly well is build the sense of escalation. Lorincz’s calls increase in frequency and intensity, but the police responses remain cursory. Deputies show up, listen, placate, and leave. They know it is Lorincz versus the neighbourhood. They call her crazy and then shrug their shoulders and go their way.

The film does not need narration to make its point: the system is designed for administrative closure, not community protection. The tension ratchets up until June 2, 2023, when Lorincz makes yet another 911 call—this time saying she feels threatened by the children outside her door. Within two minutes, another call is placed: she has shot their mother.

The bodycam footage of the immediate aftermath is unbearable. There is a mother breathing her last on the ground, there are traumatised children everywhere, and a neighbourhood left to confront a tragedy that was waiting to happen.

One of the film’s most revealing segments occurs months before the killing, when Lorincz gets trapped behind a closed gate and reacts with inexplicable fury. Rather than calling the owner, she repeatedly rams her truck into the fence. This time, someone else calls the cops on her. When an officer shows up on her property, at first Lorincz takes her time to answer the door, only doing so after impatient yelling, then when asked where she was all day, she promptly lies that she was home.

It exposes several things at once. Lorincz is guilty of the same crime she can’t tolerate in the neighbourhood children: trespassing. She also clearly has a tendency to catastrophically overreact to inconveniences. She is more than willing to lie to the police and has a habit of downplaying her own actions. In just a few minutes, her personality—its volatility, entitlement, paranoia—is laid bare.

The documentary also captures how Lorincz’s narrative unravels once investigators press her post-arrest. The interrogation room footage is particularly damning. Her story shifts and contradicts itself as detectives confront her with evidence. Gandbhir cleverly uses the camera’s clinical impartiality to build a case against Lorincz. Viewers witness how quickly the “I feared for my life” defence collapses when examined with persistence rather than deference.

Gandbhir’s focus is not simply Lorincz’s pathology, it is the system that allowed her behaviour to escalate unchecked. The film places Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws under a microscope, showing how these statutes disproportionately benefit white defendants while endangering Black victims. Owens’ family members appear as grieving truth-tellers, who contextualise the shooting within America’s long history of racial violence.

In an era saturated with true crime stories, Gandbhir’s work stands apart. The Perfect Neighbor is not an easy watch, but it is a necessary one. It is a blistering indictment of racial bias, institutional complacency, and the deadly consequences of America’s fetish for self-defence laws.

Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.