By one measure, “The Perfect Neighbor,” a documentary directed and produced by Geeta Gandbhir, tells a simple story. It recounts the events that led to the June 2023 fatal shooting of Ajike “AJ” Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, at the hands of Susan Lorincz, a 58-year-old white woman in Ocala, Florida. After opening with that fateful lethal moment, “The Perfect Neighbor” returns to tell the story in chronological order, with sparse commentary and no filmmaker narration.
In fact, with perhaps one notable exception, the film gives us no real surprises. In the first half of the film, each scene looks like the last: Susan calls the police and complains that the (mostly Black) kids on the block are trespassing on her property and acting like “animals.” The police attempt to mediate, quickly surmise that Susan is an ornery crank, and then leave after determining there is nothing they can do. Rinse and repeat. To the extent there is any humor to be found in this tragic tale, the kids on the block who are the objects of Susan’s ire don’t even bother to call her “Susan” anymore and just reflexively refer to her as “The Karen.”
The second half of the film features the grief that is left in the wake of AJ’s killing and the efforts to hold Susan to account. Rather conveniently, Susan is her own worst enemy and makes for an easy villain. Even in her most pitiful moments, sitting alone and condemned in an interrogation room, she never rises above being an ignorant racist who has taken her profound intolerance, un-neighborliness, and white privilege to an extreme end.
The conceit of “The Perfect Neighbor” is that it employs a near-total reliance on strung-together found footage from surveillance technology — police bodycams, ring cameras, CCTV, and police interrogation room recordings — which makes the viewing experience crude, but simultaneously inventive and compelling. What could have easily been a reality show a la “Cops” that casually exploits the lives of Americans in distress, eventually becomes a stress test of American race relations and 21st century gun culture.
If there is any unpredictability to be found in the story, it’s that, at first, this seems to be yet another demoralizing tale of a racist homicide that the American criminal justice system cynically dresses up and justifies as “self defense.” But the story eventually pivots into a quieter observation of Florida’s use of its Stand Your Ground law, which states that a person is not required to retreat and is legally justified to use deadly force if they reasonably fear death or bodily harm. Florida’s 2005 statute went on to inspire similar laws in other states across the country and in 2012 was notoriously used by George Zimmerman in his defense of the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Of course, Trayvon’s killing went on to prompt the modern Black Lives Matter movement.
Perhaps even more than the protests that pushed the police to prosecute her, what ultimately does Susan in is that she is an equal opportunity offender. Even the southern white officers in the sheriff’s department who haul her in don’t like her or appreciate her incessant and frivolous 911 calls. If “The Perfect Neighbor,” in the years since the egregiously immoral acquittal of Zimmerman, gives us hope that the arch of the universe bends towards justice, it also reminds us just how fickle, arbitrary, and unreliable the promise of that justice continues to be.