The popularity of true crime content on streaming has made it more challenging for legitimate documentary filmmakers to differentiate their work from exploitative fare. Since there’s only a small market for non-fiction features theatrically, documentarians that hope to distinguish themselves are left to use film festivals as a launching pad. The Perfect Neighbor debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2025, but wasn’t released on Netflix until later in the year, where it received several major awards nominations.
The Perfect Neighbor is about the murder of Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old Black woman and mother of four, who was fatally shot by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, in Orlando, Florida in 2023. Lorincz said she’s acted in self-defense, but the fatal incident occurred after weeks of tension within the community; Lorincz claimed that the neighborhood’s children, including Owens’ sons, had violated trespassing laws by playing in the street. Beyond the obvious racial component to the crime, Lorincz had experienced significant mental illness issues, and may not have been entirely conscious of the situation. The conflict was inevitable because police had already been called to the area multiple times within a year’s time by Lorincz. She was continuously unsuccessful in her attempts to inflict legal consequences on the Black children, whom she frequently disparaged with racial epithets.
There isn’t much about the events depicted in The Perfect Neighbor that’s up for debate, given that Lorincz was prosecuted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for manslaughter. What’s interesting about the film is the nature of its construction; instead of talking heads, montages, or recreations, all the footage in The Perfect Neighbor is assembled from bodycam videos taken by police officers who monitored the situation. A stipulation in state law made this visual and audio content available to the public, and The Perfect Neighbor's editing team combed through thousands of hours of footage to isolate the incidents in question. The fact that the cops were present in the area enough times for their bodycam recordings to tell a complete story is a statement in its own right, but the evidence mounted against Lorincz is even more damning.
When a case like The Perfect Neighbor’s is presented as so cut-and-dry, there’s a natural inclination to question the motivations of the filmmakers. The most significant knock against The Perfect Neighbor's proclaimed neutrality is that Owens was best friends with the sister-and-law of Geeta Gandbhir, who directed the film. This would suggest that this specific instance was chosen as a subject because Gandbhir wanted to see that justice was carried out in the public eye, and to provide a time capsule for the victim’s family. At the same time, Gandbhir could also claim journalistic value because Owens’ death was, briefly at least, a national news story.
The sitting footage was too compelling to keep concealed, and the nature of the police officers’ function in the narrative gave the team behind The Perfect Neighbor everything necessary for a documentary. The cops had to question people present at the scene of each investigation about the context for their arrival, which gave the film a machine in which to deliver exposition. Similarly, the mounting anxiety that the officers felt after being called an unusually frequent number of times to the same location matched the dread faced by viewers who understood the consequences as tragic. If there’s anything that The Perfect Neighbor could be dinged for within the community of documentarians, it’s that it isn’t explicitly anti-cop. In an era of “defund the police” demands, The Perfect Neighbor’s suggestion is that the Florida officers did everything in their power to diffuse the situation. The blame is placed solely on Lorincz, with the open question being whether the murder could have been avoided if the cops were given more authority.
The conversation that The Perfect Neighbor has raised about stand-your-ground law is complex because it’s tied into a broader discussion about the rights of gun owners. It was after Florida enacted new legal standards, obliquely referred to as “shoot first” laws, that reported violent crimes tripled in instances where the shooter claimed to have acted in self-defense. The Perfect Neighbor doesn’t have to work hard to make this connection because Lorincz’s personal device indicated she’s researched the law, and had likely searched for a way to shoot her neighbor that wouldn’t result in her imprisonment. A defense could be mounted, either argumentatively or sincerely, that these laws were implemented to defend marginalized people who may have experienced racial prejudice on behalf of the cops. The Perfect Neighbor doesn’t dig into this debate because there isn’t anything explicitly racially-charged within the interactions between the officers and the victim’s family, even if the controversy regarding other Florida crimes (such as the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012), hang over the film.
It may speak to the way true crime has trained audiences’ viewing habits that The Perfect Neighbor was one of Netflix’s biggest hits of 2025, and vastly outperformed the studio’s mediocre genre films, including The Woman in Cabin 10 and Havoc. It's an unpleasant and challenging viewing experience that points to systemic hatred that can’t be defined, predicted, or fully reckoned with. If political football is to be played with the various topics addressed in The Perfect Neighbor, they’re secondary to the immediacy of the tragedy. Enough time has passed for a well-made drama show to serve as a sufficient replacement for the legacy of tabloid accounts.