by Nick Taylor
Geeta Gandhbir’s The Perfect Neighbor has to be one of the most widely accessible films nominated at this year’s Gotham Awards, premiering only a few weeks ago on Netflix. With a title so banal as to signal immediate dread, the true-crime subject matter made it priority viewing to some even before it received this citation. My own queasiness with the genre kept me from watching it until now, and it's an intriguing object to consider in how it relates to other activist documents. Assembled almost exclusively of footage collected from police bodycams, security cameras, drone footage, news archives, and court tapings, the film chronicles the boiling tensions in an Ocala, Florida neighborhood over two years that culminated in the killing of Ajike Owens by Susan Lorincz on June 2, 2023. It’s an upsetting document of an all-too-familiar American tragedy, streamlined into a more broadly resonant object but possibly verging on exploitative and under-contextualized in the process . . . .
Some viewers may already balk at Gandhbir’s chosen format of stitching together years of bodycam footage. Interpolating talking heads might have only added to the sense of The Perfect Neighbor as Dateline fodder. The only narration we get is from unseen voices interviewed after the shooting, providing additional context for Susan’s antagonisms and the neighborhood’s responses. On the other hand, the mix of shaky, chest-level camerawork and the implaccable eye of security cameras have their own connotations of YouTube naval-gazing, designed for viewers looking to gawk at the outrageous actions of citizens before they’re wrangled by police. Ethical questions about what would be appropriate for any true-crime media to depict, exclude, or frame take on different dimensions with a found-footage archival format.
To its credit, The Perfect Neighbor never comes across as turning Susan’s racist belligerence or Ajike’s murder into lurid entertainment. There’s a real succinctness to the editing, which seemingly lets each house call play out in real time. Ajike is not unduly foregrounded by the footage. She’s simply one of many parents we see at their front yards at all hours of the day to protect their children against Susan’s nastiness. With no sense of the dynamics at play between the police and the different members of the neighborhood being given unequal weight, the question then becomes about what Gandhbir elects to show us, and whether the violence being inflicted on this community is being replicated or magnified by the film itself. Do we have any right to watch Ajike’s son, bawling his eyes out after his mother was taken to the hospital, try to tell the police how the shooting happened? Is anything we might learn from watching Ajike’s father tell her children that mom is gone worth the violation that comes from this image being displayed for an audience of millions? If the answer is yes, should we extend this to the body cams themselves, and the efficacy of an omnipresent surveillance state that can’t even prevent a mother from being shot in front of her son?
The cracks and dissonances between the scenes of The Perfect Neighbor are the part I’ve thought of the most, albeit in ways that feel like a Rorschach test on the viewer’s behalf. This made me so helplessly outraged I looked up nuisance laws in Florida (and Ohio) to find out what, if anything, could have been done to nip Susan’s endless phone calls in the bud before her entitled rage became homicidal. On that note, I’m quite fascinated by The Perfect Neighbor's portrait of policing. Sure, the officers seem peachy-keen and respectful, but how should we take the lack of any police intervention against Susan’s repeated, blatantly false and abusive reporting against her neighbors? It doesn’t look as though any nuisance complaints were filed against this woman, yet it appears her nasty attitudes and near-daily calls to the police became legendary among dispatch officers before she picked up a gun. Some cops are called to the neighborhood multiple times, to the point where they seem to have a rapport of congeniality and “can you believe this shit?” eye-rolling between them and the aggrieved Ocala community.
So if everyone knew Susan was this bilious all the fucking time, knew she lied about when and why she shot Ajike, knew her to be a serial liar who called children the N-word, why did it take so long for her to be officially arraigned on murder chargers? Why was this behavior taken as a given to be worked around rather than a nuisance to be dealt with? In no time flat the high fenced patio space in front of Susan’s doorway quickly accrues the same eerie resonance as the basement corner in The Blair Witch Project. This had to have been as true for the people physically entering that space as it was for me as the viewer, and they lived with that shit for over two years. Were there efforts to counter her that the film strategically omitted, or is what malignancy so pervasive that someone needs to die before anyone moves against it?
These questions of accountability are synthesized in the film’s last major scene, as Susan is interrogated for the final time amidst mounting pressure and incredulity from the public the longer she goes without being charged. The Perfect Neighbor captures this through the lone security camera in the police station’s interview room, looking down on her as she fidgets and falls still. Her entitlement reaches galling heights as she tries to wave away past interactions where she called the neighborhood kids slaves and used the N-word, hoping against all odds her whiteness can protect her from her most grievous sinns. The interrogating officers are grimly steadfast in presenting the inconsistencies in her story and pushing against her lies. Susan never offers the Law & Order finale breakdown, instead withdrawing completely inward as she learns she's been formally charged with manslaughter in the first degree. There's no drama, no lurid glee as they haul her away, and The Perfect Neighbor knows better than to pretend this story needs or deserves it.
Yes, it’s good to see this woman get arrested and found guilty for her crimes. We can’t take that shit for granted in America, not at any point in US history and especially not at this moment. Yet The Perfect Neighbor boldly refuses to make this conventionally satisfying. A condensed presentation of Susan’s trial are presented across the end credits, punctuated by information on Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws and scored to some generic legal drama notes. And it’s so bleak to read the statistics of this defense being applied disproportionately - or maybe just primarily - in racially motivated murders of Black Americans committed by White Americans, without even the weakest feint to indicate things might get better. Ajike’s killing represents one permutation of preventable gun violence ingrained in US culture among many. It's a surprisingly hopeless note to end on, one that makes the film's earlier ugliness feel more honest to this particular vision without totally alleviating the qualms I've expressed.
The Perfect Neighbor is currently streaming on Netflix.
