Police respond to a dispute involving Susan Lorincz, the subject of the Netflix documentary The Perfect Neighbor, who was convicted in 2024 of killing her neighbour Ajike “AJ” Owens. Photo / Netflix
Director Geeta Gandbhir didn’t know what she would encounter when she received the thumb drive from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in August 2023.
Two months earlier, a family friend, Ajike “AJ” Owens, was shot and killed by her neighbour, Susan Lorincz, in a central-Florida suburb. Owens, a 35-year-old Black woman, had gone over to Lorincz’s home on June 2 after Lorincz, a 58-year-old White woman, threw a pair of roller skates at Owens’ 9-year-old son. Moments after Owens arrived at Lorincz’s doorstep, Lorincz fired at Owens from behind the dead-bolted front door. Afterwards, Lorincz told police she feared Owens was going to kill her. She was defending herself, she said. She was standing her ground.
The thumb drive contained “a jumble of files”, Gandbhir said – all the material pertaining to Owens’ case, as the attorneys representing Owens’ family had requested. The files included about 30 hours of video footage and audio from police body cameras, dashcams, detective interviews, interrogations and phone calls.
It was revelatory, Gandbhir said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this footage goes back two years.’”
It showed the moment Owens’ children learned their mother would not be coming home. It showed Lorincz in a small interrogation room, admitting that she may have called her neighbours “the n-word”. (She was taught the word “meant you were being unlawful, dirty … generally just not being pleasant”, she explained.) It showed police repeatedly responding to Lorincz’s 911 calls, disputes that began over families walking their dogs near her home or children playing too loudly.
“I’m peaceful. I’m, like, the perfect neighbour,” Lorincz tells them at one point. “You barely ever see me.”
The Owens family had hoped Gandbhir and her partner, Nikon Kwantu, would be able to identify clips that could be shared with the media to help keep the story in the public eye.
“This is not just something for the news,” Gandbhir recalled Kwantu telling her. “There might be a bigger story.”
Two years later, Gandbhir’s documentary of the events that transpired in that community, The Perfect Neighbor, is stirring audiences. A winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was released on Netflix this month and quickly became the streaming platform’s most-watched movie in the United States.
Critics have praised the film as “subversive” and “heart-pounding”. On TikTok, where the movie and its subjects have been trending, viewers have called the movie a must-watch and posted passionate reactions to the film – some in tears, others simmering with anger.
“I never cried and got mad so much until I watched The Perfect Neighbor, one person said.
The film deliberately avoids much of the formula – and potential pitfalls – that define the true-crime genre. There are no talking heads contextualising events for the viewer or representing the myriad sides involved. Because police body cameras are the lens through which most of the movie unfolds, the viewer often feels embedded within law enforcement, a passive witness to the drama unfolding on the street Owens and Lorincz shared.
“It was really important to us to make sure that we showed a 360 of what happened on the ground,” Gandbhir said in a video interview from her Brooklyn apartment the day before the film’s Netflix release.
“We wanted, with this footage, for the audience to really be immersed … for it to play like a narrative and for them to be able to come to their own conclusions about what happened.”
Drone footage depicting the quiet mundanities of the working-class suburb – trees shaking in the wind, a patchy lawn – interrupts the action from time to time. But these images are often tinged with dread. Frequently, they’re accompanied by audio of detectives interviewing neighbours after the fatal shooting. Those testimonies are a “choir”, Ghandbhir said, representing the community Lorincz took arms against.
Because Lorincz’s calls are the reason the cops – and the cameras – enter the neighbourhood in the first place, she, not Owens, becomes the film’s primary subject. The object of Lorincz’s ire was the neighbourhood children, a racially diverse assembly of kids (including three of Owens’ four children) who ride bikes together, play football and roller-skate under the watchful eye of various adults in the community.
These are scenes that many Americans – including the cops answering Lorincz’s 911 calls – may consider idyllic, even quaint. (In the documentary, a sheriff’s deputy even tells the neighbourhood children, “I’d rather see you guys outside playing than on them TikToks.”) But the kids, most of whom appear to be preteens and younger, are menacing and violent in Lorincz’s eyes. She swears at them and calls them “retards”. She threatens to send a “cease and desist” order because the kids are playing too loudly in a yard that is not hers. The kids, in turn, refer to her as “the Karen” – a 21st-century pejorative for an entitled White woman.
“Everyone down this whole block has yelled at this lady because of how she talks to kids,” a female neighbour told the cops in December 2022. By spring 2023, one male neighbour grumbled that Lorincz was calling 911 “like, twice a week”.
Even the police appear to grow increasingly exasperated with Lorincz; one refers to her as a “psycho” after chatting with the children she had reported. Still, they answer Lorincz’s calls with pat sympathy. They advise the kids not to bother her. They tell her to call again “if there are any future problems”.
Gandbhir believes law enforcement “didn’t see Susan as a threat”. After Lorincz shot Owens, neighbours told detectives that Lorincz had recently escalated her harassment of the neighbourhood children, including brandishing a gun at them. Some even believed Lorincz had set Owens up to be killed.
The aftermath of that shooting is the film’s most devastating sequence, capturing some of Owens’ last breaths as she lay on the ground outside Lorincz’s home. The anguished yell of her children’s father when an officer whispers in his ear that Owens has died. Her children reflexively trying to run away when he tells them, “Mum’s not coming back anymore.” Owens’ mother screaming “Why?” through the phone when she hears her daughter had died.
On social media, viewers of the documentary have shared visceral responses to these scenes, with some posting pictures of their tear-streaked faces or videos of themselves wailing into their hands. But others expressed reservations, warning that such scenes amounted to “Black trauma porn”.
Gandbhir said film-makers questioned whether they should include that footage – and to what extent. Before making the film, Gandbhir asked Owens’ mother, Pam Dias, for permission to tell the story.
“Even though she was in the midst of her grief, she was like, ‘No, the world needs to know what happened to my baby,’” Gandbhir said. Dias didn’t know how the film would turn out until Gandbhir sent her the cut they were planning to show at Sundance in January.
“She didn’t change her stance,” Gandbhir said. “She wants more to come out of this … she wants to turn her pain into purpose.”
Part of that purpose, Gandbhir said, is turning a critical eye to larger issues of gun and racial violence – concerns that seem to have ebbed out of the national consciousness in the past year, despite their impact on generations of Americans and their communities.
Of particular interest to the film is Florida’s “stand your ground” law – which Lorincz invoked after she shot Owens. It took days for Florida police to arrest her; investigators told media outlets at the time that they first needed to determine whether Lorincz met the criteria for the law when she shot Owens through a dead-bolted metal door.
The scenes of Lorincz’s interrogation are the most “cinematic”, in Gandbhir’s view – and arguably the most revealing. At one point, when police inform Lorincz they are arresting her for manslaughter, she simply refuses to go with them. “No. I’m not going. Sorry,” she tells them in a back-and-forth that lasts more than three minutes. “I don’t care. Kill me.”
That scene shook many of the people responding to the film online. Some chalked it up to “White privilege”. (“The audacity!” said one TikToker.) Others were astonished at how patient the police were with her.
At screenings, “people often laugh at that scene”, Gandbhir said. “I have to say, I do, too, because you can’t believe the detectives can’t get her out of the chair.”
Lorincz was ultimately convicted of manslaughter and sentenced in November 2024 to 25 years in prison. In a September interview from behind bars with a local TV station, Lorincz maintained that she feared for her life.
Critics praising The Perfect Neighbor have noted that what unfolded between Lorincz and her surrounding community feels like a microcosm of a post-pandemic America: the mounting distrust and polarisation, the fear, the unchecked paranoia, the panopticon of surveillance footage, body cameras and personal devices capturing it all.
But audiences have also lauded the families who lived in the neighbourhood: the adults who stood up for each other’s children, who told police they look out for them “like I look out for my own”.
On social media this week, one parent featured in the documentary said those families have since moved out of the neighbourhood. But in the documentary, “We were able to recreate this beautiful little community as they were living before,” Gandbhir said.
“That, to me, is really part of the gift of this footage,” she said.