This shocking documentary by Geeta Gandbhir has been nominated for an Academy Award this year.
At a time when race relations in the US are an all-time low,  The Perfect Neighbour, exposes the insecurity and hate of a white woman, who shoots dead her Black neighbour using the provision of America’s Stand Your Ground Laws which go easy on self-defence killing.
Pieced together almost entirely from police body-camera footage, 911 calls, and interrogation room recordings, the film is a masterpiece of “found footage” non-fiction—a harrowing descent into the mundane escalations that led to the 2023 killing of Ajike “AJ” Owens in Ocala, Florida. ​
It’s an experimental true crime format, that drops the talking heads style for a more realistic style. By utilising two years’ worth of body-cam footage from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, Gandbhir creates an immersive, chronological timeline. The killer, Susan Lorincz called the police repeatedly because she viewed the laughter of children playing in a vacant lot as a personal assault. The cops ought to have taken note, but did not
The camera serves as a silent, impartial witness to the turmoil caused by one woman’s toxicity. It caused the senseless death of Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four.
 After Lorincz allegedly threw a pair of skates at one of Owens’ children, AJ did what any mother would: she walked to Lorincz’s door to demand an explanation. She was met not with a conversation, but with a single bullet fired through a locked door.
The film captures the heartbreaking footage of AJ’s partner having to tell their four young sons that their mother isn’t coming home. Susan Lorincz sitting in an interrogation room, calmly describing herself as “the perfect neighbour” to the detectives.
In the US, there were so many cases of unprovoked shootings of Black. Gandbhir uses this case to indict a broader legal and social landscape, and laws that can be, misused to justify killing.
The editor Viridiana Lieberman deserves credit for managing thousands of hours of grainy, shaky police footage to create a narrative that feels like a disturbing thriller.
It shows a mirror to contemporary society that looks away or forgets too soon, when such tragedies repeatedly occur.
The Perfect Neighbour
Directed by: Geeta Gandbhir
On Netflix
