The Perfect Neighbor: Community Anatomy
By Karenna Blomberg
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
A pair of police officers respond to a disturbance call in a small neighborhood in Ocala, Florida. Children from several houses in the area are playing together in a yard and in the street. Arriving on the site, they assess the scene, and while one makes his way to the house of the woman who made the 911 call, the other takes testimony from some of the children and their parents. “It was the Karen!” who called them, one kid tells him. He doesn’t seem particularly surprised by any of it. This was not the first time the police have been called to this neighborhood by the same person for the same thing. The kids go back to playing football.
One officer interviews the “Karen”—Susan Lorincz, a mid-50s single white woman living in one half of a duplex down the street. Lorincz is insistent that the children had been playing on her property and disturbing her peace, and that when she told them to get off her property, one of their mothers threw a yard sign at her. The first officer, meanwhile, is interviewing that mother—Ajike Owens, who insists that she did not harm Lorincz, and that she is the kind of person who “stays inside and doesn’t bother anyone.”
This early scene of Geeta Gandbhir’s first person documentary The Perfect Neighbor (2025) acts as an eerie preclusion to the film’s later events. In fact, true to her words, we hardly see any more of Ajike for the majority of the film. That is, until the documentary’s culmination on the events of June 2, 2023, where, tragically, Lorincz shoots and kills her. Cobbling together police body camera footage, 911 call audio, and security camera footage, Gandbhir consciously reconstructs the events that occurred in the Ocala neighborhood leading up to, including, and after the night of the shooting.
Although the format of the documentary automatically places the viewer as a third party to the conflicts between Lorincz and the other families in the neighborhood, the camera does not act as an impartial observer. Quickly, it becomes clear that Lorincz is a socially and emotionally isolated person, as well as a previous sexual assault victim. However, she frequently channels these things into self-victimization and paranoia. She is also deeply racist toward the Black children and parents in the neighborhood, Owens among them. Quite a bit of the film’s first half features exasperated officers trying to respond to her repeated calls about the neighborhood children playing in an abandoned lot near her house, with varying levels of good faith.
The film’s format successfully pulls at the initial threads of many necessary conversations surrounding the incident without actually making any commentary on its own. Owens’ murder reignited conversations in America surrounding “stand-your-ground” laws, especially how they are frequently tied to racism and discrimination, and The Perfect Neighbor elicits further discussions on this front.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Additionally, watching everything slowly play out from the perspective of the police officers invites uncomfortable questions about the role and effectiveness of police in these situations. Everything that is meant to prevent tragedies like this, from the laws to the officers enforcing them, seems to err on the side of allowing Lorincz the benefit of the doubt, even when it is clear that she is the only one disturbing the peace in the neighborhood.
The further the film goes on, the more it feels nauseatingly inevitable that there will be no resolution to the ongoing disputes without violence, and the first-person point of view only amplifies that hopelessness. You feel especially helpless as you watch Lorincz’s gripes with the neighborhood become pettier, then more obviously exaggerated and falsified. Your heart sinks when you learn that she keeps a gun in the house. You want to scream at the police to take Lorincz’s clear mental disturbance more seriously, and you try to shake off the feeling that, in more ways than one, you are the police in this scene.
Gandbhir’s direction is nearly invisible in the film, but this is exactly where its effectiveness lies. In an interview with Variety, Gandbhir reveals that Owens had been a friend of her sister-in-law. That extremely personal connection is perfectly reflected in the seamless, clinical unfolding of the documentary’s events; in the way Gandbhir does not exploit the case as a salacious true crime story, and in the way we linger devastatingly with Owens’ bereaved family long after Lorincz has been arrested. And, most powerfully, in the way the rest of the neighborhood and greater community come together around them after Owens’ death to protest the judicial leniency Lorincz was shown both before and after the fact.
An empathetic view of a deeply unsympathetic person, The Perfect Neighbor is not easy to watch. Its blunt filmmaking style and adept direction offer a new cut into conversations that are continuously, agonizingly relevant. It does not provide answers—it doesn’t even directly provide questions, in fact. But what it does provide is a place to confront these issues in a personal, inexorable way.