A non-fiction narrative recounted primarily through police bodycam footage, The Perfect Neighbor speaks volumes. Produced and directed by the award-winning Geeta Gandbhir, it is both brilliant journalism and sensitive storytelling: a life-and-death drama, a tragedy born of neighborhood tensions—and a microcosm of our nation’s deepest wounds. Even so, in spite of its horrors, this film is not without hope. Not the comforting kind, but the insistent conviction that we can do better.

The facts: On a quiet evening in central Florida, a mother knocked on her neighbor’s door—and never came home. It all began with repeated 911 calls, complaints of noisy kids playing near a resident’s home. Police responded with perfunctory sympathy, trying to placate all concerned. Time passed; pressures escalated. The resident confiscated a boy’s tablet—shouting racist slurs in the process—and his mother went to retrieve it. The resident fired a handgun through her closed front door ... then claimed self-defense under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, the same rationale that gained nationwide infamy after the 2012 death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

The killing of Ajike “AJ” Owens, a young Black mother of four, by her White neighbor Susan Lorincz was appalling. It was also predictable: the result of a system that turns fear and resentment into justification.

Full disclosure: AJ Owens was a close friend of the filmmaker’s family. Anticipating Lorincz’s likely defense, Gandbhir began to follow the case. Yet despite personal ties, she and editor Viridinia Lieberman chose restraint. What could’ve been a journalistic broadside, an ACAB attack—aka an “All Cops Are Bastards” movie—became an objective investigation. Part true crime plus police procedural … and gripping from start to finish. Not a dry eye in the theater.

It’s rare for a film like this to exist, and rarer still for it to feel so intimate.

Other comparable ‘found-footage’ films exist: Incident exposes dishonest policing via body cams; The Alabama Solution reveals prison injustice through contraband phones. But The Perfect Neighbor finds the universal in the personal, and feels more like a thriller. Without sensationalism or morbid fascination—a parallel to The Voice of Hind Rajab, where a Palestinian child begs for help in a 70-minute recording—Gandbhir grounds her narrative in humanity. By combining 911 calls with cell phone and surveillance footage, she builds character and context. By presenting the evidence without external opinions, she avoids partisan preaching and foregone conclusions. And by choosing personal specificity over impersonal data, she creates moments of heart-wrenching immediacy. Empathy. Even for the police: rather than portray them as villains, she highlights ineffective bureaucracy, where inaction and impotence yield tragic results.

The unstated truth: Owens’s death is not an outlier—it’s a mirror. The film’s innocuous title, taken from Lorincz’s own testimonial to police, reflects the all-too-common belief that ignoring our flaws will make them disappear. Some of us call for reform, others debate intent, but the flaws remain. Repetition is the point: the stories change; the systems don’t. Until we admit this, hope is fleeting.

Produced by Sam Bisbee and Park Pictures Features, The Perfect Neighbor continues their legacy of confronting injustice (Daughters, Earth Mama) without losing hope. This may be an oxymoron, but it’s also a meditation: connecting us not to the systems that fail us, but to our own proximity to injustice, and our capacity to do better. A film that breaks our heart, then insists that we use it.

When a film speaks for itself, reviews become simple: go see it.

Reviewed at Sundance 2025 and NYFF 2025.

105 min.

Where to Watch: Streaming on Netflix on October 17 2025.

The Perfect Neighbor

Nouvelle Vague