The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Review of "The Perfect Neighbor"

Handling the Truth: Review of The Perfect Neighbor

★★★1/2

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

Ever since the Lumiere Brothers produced “actuality films” (single shot recordings of real-life events like train arrivals and galloping horses), various iterations of cinematic travelogues, and Joseph Flaherty’s groundbreaking 1922 documentary Nanook of the North, documentary filmmakers have sought to record, report, and reveal our existential reality—to bring us true stories from every corner of the world and from any nook and cranny in our own backyards.

Of course, the truth is not that easy to capture—if it can be cornered at all. It’s not all that easy to recognize and even harder to define. It can be argued that we share a common foundation defining the reality of the outside world, but previous experience, social conventions, norms, and expectations, as well as language and thought shape our individual respective realities. These can vary greatly from person to person, so every it follows that reality has a distinctive personalized point-of-view. We’ve all seen how one person’s reality can be the foundation for another’s skepticism. (And I will not go any deeper into that rabbit hole).

This begs the question: are documentary films truly objective depictions of reality or are they necessarily tilted—perhaps even unconsciously—toward the filmmaker’s point-of-view? Maybe the Lumiere Brothers’ single shot recording of a train arriving is objective, but when a documentary narrative like Nanook, Sympathy for the Devil, or An Inconvenient Truth presents its “truth”, whose truth is it?

Subgenres like concert films or nature documentaries might seem objective on the surface, but the fact that they must be structured and edited into compelling narratives to reflect—or create—their reality makes them just as contrived as feature films. The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense are great concert films, but they are first and foremost stories.

On programs like Nature or Planet Earth, when a wild leopard kills a baby monkey or adorable meerkat, the event is inevitably framed by the narration and the editing of “natural” footage in ways to capture the audience’s sympathy.

The Perfect Neighbor, a 2025 feature documentary, is extraordinary for its groundbreaking use of natural or “found” footage. Director Geeta Gandbhir uses a combination of police bodycam footage, interrogation videotapes, and 911 calls to portray the building neighborhood tensions that culminated in cold-blooded murder and its chaotic aftermath.

The film begins as the Marion County Sheriff’s Office is answering a trespassing and noise complaint. They question the complainant, a white woman named Susan Lorincz, who accused the neighborhood children (most of whom are African-American) of trespassing on her property—which turns out to belong to an absentee landlord—and of the noise neighborhood kids were making.

The bodycam footage shows officers speaking to Ms. Lorincz and then interviewing the neighbors, all of whom say that the woman constantly harasses the neighborhood kids. The neighbors seem reasonable, respectful, but assert the right for their kids to be outside playing and to be—well, kids.

As the months go by, Ms. Lorincz makes more calls to the police, asserting the kid are throwing things at the house and terrorizing her, none of which she has proof for. The neighbors, including Ajike Owens, vents her frustration at Lorincz’s accusations against her kids.

In one bodycam scene, an officer speaks to the kids as a group, reminding them about being respectful, nice, and not harassing people. The kids maintain they’re just playing in the open space next to Lorincz’s house and are not giving her a hard time.

The calls keep coming in through 2022 and into 2023. It seems some of the sheriff’s respondents are becoming frustrated themselves with Ms. Lorincz while others seem more inclined to take her side.

In a separate incident, a car repair shop owner reports that Lorincz rammed the fence to his business with her truck. When pressed by the police about why she did it, Lorincz cannot give a coherent answer, saying that she was confused and disoriented.

The neighborhood dispute finally culminates one night when Lorincz allegedly takes one of the children’s tablets. When his mother Ajike came to confront her about it, Lorincz shot her through her closed front door and killed her.

The following bodycam sequences displaying the raw grief and anger of the community are simply harrowing. The 911 calls to the emergency room, the footage of the neighbors frantic with worry and anger, and the fear and grief of her children when they discover she has passed is horrific.

This footage is raw. There is no one manipulating the images the events are run chronologically. Much of it is chaos. When the sheriffs go to Ms. Lorincz’s home to arrest her, it is infinitely more visceral than anything a viewer might see on Cops or any other network-produced reality crime show. It is raw indeed, like news footage after a natural disaster, and Gandbhir is shrewd enough to let the footage speak for itself.

The morning after the killing, Ms. Lorincz, probably because of the Florida stand-your-ground laws, has not been arrested. There are ugly rumblings in the neighborhood, but cooler heads prevail. When Lorincz returns to get necessaries from her home, she finds—not surprisingly—it has been trashed by angry neighbors. Over the next few days, tensions heighten when neighbors discover the shooter is still free. According to Florida’s stand-your-ground laws, it is legal to shoot someone threatening a person in their home. Residents are afraid that Lorincz, a white woman, will not be charged with shooting a black woman pounding on her door.

The next few sequences show police detectives examining the murder suspect. This footage comes directly from the interrogation room cameras and records the course that justice will take in this case.

Without explicit voice-over commentary or implicit messaging through narrative structure or editing, director Geeta Garbdhin has produced what seems to be an accurate portrayal of systemic failures in our enforcement and legal systems as well as the tragic result of the passage of gun laws weaponizing white fear.

In a “Film Comment” magazine interview, filmmaker Geeta Gabdhain relates how she was drawn into the production of the film because of family. Her sister-in-law was friends with the murdered woman, and Ms. Gabdhain maintains she never intended the film to be a true-crime narrative but simply a “story that happened to my family.”—her personal truth. When asked about using found footage, she said “police body-cam footage is used to surveil communities of color in order to protect the police, so we wanted to flip that on its head and use it to show the point of view of this community.” (Film Comment).

Trying to sift facts out of this narrative—or any non-fiction film—from preconceptions, ideologies, or outright lies can be difficult, if not impossible. In this case, the uncut bodycam footage paired with the filmed interrogation seem to be bare recordings of facts. These are stationary fixed cameras designed to record events, not to interpret them, as a director or editor might do, even though, as Gabdhain stated, the bodycam footage flipped the focus from cops to community.

The Perfect Neighbor is a hard film to watch at times. It doesn’t take long to realize what we’re seeing is a white woman whose racism results in a senseless murder. While the events in this crime seem inevitable, they didn’t have to be. One conclusion—subjective or not—that should be drawn from this film is that an unstable woman’s passive-aggressive behavior toward her black neighbors was left unchecked. Ajike’s murder was the direct result of racism, dangerously irresponsible gun laws, and systemic failure of the justice system.

This truth emerges from the footage organically, without embellishment. The facts speak for themselves. The question is now what we might do with this truth to prevent even more killings.

The Perfect Neighbor is not a perfect film, but it manages to reveal a series of truths that are difficult to watch and even more difficult to acknowledge. It is, to my mind, a ground-breaking documentary that deserves–and needs–to be seen by every American.