Geeta Gandbhir’s ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ is a Devastating Documentary That Exposes the Deadly Cost of Stand Your Ground Laws

There’s an infuriating inevitability to “The Perfect Neighbor,” Geeta Gandbhir’s searing new documentary now streaming on Netflix. From its opening moments, we know where this story leads: to a doorstep in Ocala, Florida, where 35-year-old Ajike “AJ” Owens, a Black mother of four, will be shot and killed by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, on June 2, 2023. What makes Gandbhir’s film so heart-pounding—and so essential—is watching the slow-motion catastrophe unfold through an unprecedented use of police bodycam footage, 911 calls, and interrogation recordings that capture every escalating moment leading to tragedy.

As The New York Times notes, the documentary “couldn’t exist outside of a surveillance society,” but that’s precisely the world we inhabit. What Gandbhir accomplishes with this archive is nothing short of revolutionary: a true-crime documentary that requires no reenactments, no speculation, just the chilling reality of how a neighborhood dispute devolved into murder, all recorded in real time by the very systems meant to prevent such tragedies.

Geeta Gandbhir’s Journey

For Gandbhir, “The Perfect Neighbor” represents both a professional achievement and an intensely personal reckoning. The Emmy-winning director began her career in narrative film under the guidance of Spike Lee and Sam Pollard, working for eleven years in scripted film with renowned figures including the Coen Brothers and Robert Altman before transitioning into documentary filmmaking.

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Gandbhir has worked on a range of films on racial justice, social inequity, and gender, winning several awards for her work including “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” (2006), “By the People: The Election of Barack Obama” (2009), “A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers” (2015), and “I Am Evidence” (2017).

As an editor, her films have been nominated twice for the Academy Award, winning once, and have also won four Peabody Awards. She has been nominated for six Emmy Awards and won two. Most recently, she directed “Born in Synanon,” a documentary series for Paramount+ in 2023, and her short film from the HBO series “Through Our Eyes: Apart” won a 2022 Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary.

But “The Perfect Neighbor” is different. Ajike Owens was the best friend of Gandbhir’s sister-in-law—a connection that The Times notes “probably should be disclosed in the documentary” but adds an undeniable urgency to the filmmaker’s mission. “This shocking crime left my family and me engulfed in grief and confusion,” Gandbhir said.

“The Perfect Neighbor is a deeply personal project, created to transform grief into purpose and honor the lasting legacy of Ajike Owens and her family,” Gandbhir explained. When Gandbhir’s partner and fellow producer Nikon Kwantu learned that Lorincz might use Florida’s stand-your-ground law as a defense, they went to Florida and began filming.

A Forensic Reconstruction of Horror

Using mostly police body-cam footage, along with news imagery, videos from home security cameras, and interrogation room recordings, Gandbhir reconstructs the story of the 2023 killing. The film’s structure is deceptively simple but devastatingly effective: we watch as Lorincz, then 58, calls the sheriff’s office repeatedly over many months, complaining about Owens’s children playing on property adjacent to her home.

As Variety’s Peter Debruge observes, “The irony here is that it was Lorincz—the potentially dangerous party—who was constantly calling 911.” The police respond in February 2022, and because the deputies wear body cameras, we get multiple perspectives of their visits, along with neighbors’ accounts and Lorincz’s version of events.

“That lady is always messing with people’s kids,” one neighbor says of Lorincz. “She bossy,” says a little girl, identifying Lorincz as an angry “Karen.”

The Times describes the documentary as “heart-pounding” because “we know what happens to Owens from the beginning. For much of the movie, we’re watching the escalation”. Eventually, Lorincz shoots Owens when she goes to confront her about an altercation with the children.

The film also raises uncomfortable questions about our surveillance culture. As The Times notes, “there’s something queasy and fundamentally weird about all of this footage being available for the whole world to watch.”

The Power—and Peril—of Surveillance

What makes the footage so remarkable is its cinematic quality: “In a fiction film, a director often shoots a scene from different angles, with wide and close-up shots, and various characters in the foreground. Here the same effect is accomplished just from the many cameras around.”

As producer Kwantu explained, “There was a lot of footage, and you don’t know what you’re looking at, you don’t know the sequence. You’re watching something that goes from normal to not so normal to ‘Wait, where’s this going?’ When I looked at it, I was just like, ‘I think this is the film’.”

Variety’s Debruge praises the film as “both formally innovative and philosophically necessary,” noting how Gandbhir “reconstructs this one dispute—from the very first 911 call to the final courtroom verdict—almost entirely from official footage.”

Stand Your Ground on Trial

Beyond the immediate tragedy, Gandbhir’s film serves as a damning indictment of Florida’s “stand your ground” statute. After Lorincz’s arrest, sheriff’s deputies found evidence that she had researched the law, which allows residents to use deadly force if they feel threatened on their own property.

Through interrogation-room footage, we listen to Lorincz’s conversation with authorities, which involves racial slurs and language clearly lifted from the “stand your ground” law, as well as Lorincz’s insistence that trauma from her own childhood sexual abuse caused her to feel afraid.

The Times observes that “there’s no editorializing here, but we can see just how much of what she’s saying is actually true”. (Lorincz was ultimately convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 25 years in prison.)

Laws like Florida’s “stand your ground” statute “now exist in one form or another in more than half of the states in the U.S.,” but it was Florida’s that attracted scrutiny after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013. As Paste Magazine notes, these are “a suite of laws that serve to perfectly illustrate our country’s prejudices and racial imbalance.”

Critical Reception and Ethical Questions

“The Perfect Neighbor” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 24, where it won the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary. It has also received a Special Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

The critical response has been largely positive, with reviewers praising its innovative approach while grappling with its ethical implications. The film currently holds a 7.4 rating on IMDb, with one reviewer noting: “Lorincz’s delusions operate within a larger cultural permission structure—the white woman’s fear of Black presence, laundered through law and ‘stand your ground’ rhetoric.”

Roger Ebert’s reviewer observes the tragedy starkly: “Her name was Ajike Owens, and all she was trying to do was stand up for her children. Despite this very obvious murder, the police do not take her into custody” immediately.

Paste Magazine describes it as “an infuriating case study of apathetic police intervention in a dispute that surely and steadily turns deadly”, while acknowledging that “the fact that Lorincz ended up being locked away is hardly the status quo, in cases such as these.”

However, the film also raises uncomfortable questions about our surveillance culture. As The Times notes, “there’s something queasy and fundamentally weird about all of this footage being available for the whole world to watch.” The review draws parallels to shows like “Cops” or “To Catch a Predator,” which used law enforcement video for entertainment.

“A film like this might, in years past, have been seen in the set-apart solemnity of a theater, where audiences would watch together and perhaps discuss afterward. Now it’s on Netflix, where virtually anyone can stream it right at home—a kind of context collapse that reminds us how terrifying it is to live in a world where we are always surveilled.”

One reviewer captured this tension: “At its best, it feels urgent, intelligent, and morally alive. But at its worst, it leans so hard into archival footage that you sometimes feel less guided and more overwhelmed by raw material.”

The Verdict

Despite these valid concerns, “The Perfect Neighbor” stands as essential viewing. The Times concludes: “This is a systemic issue, not a single-film problem. ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ deserves to be broadly seen, discussed and heeded.”

Variety argues that Gandbhir’s approach is necessary: “Until we see a vastly different response from those meant to ‘serve and protect’ in our society—a response that would make the visuals of ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ unrecognizably different—then Gandbhir’s point will remain clearly and painfully necessary.”

The film succeeds not through manipulation or sensationalism, but through its commitment to showing rather than telling. By presenting “just footage and eyewitness accounts,” viewers themselves “become eyewitnesses” to how systemic failures, racial prejudice, and dangerous legislation combined to take Ajike Owens’s life.

Producer Alisa Payne articulated the film’s larger mission: “Hopefully through [Owens’s] legacy we can fight ‘stand your ground’ and other harmful policies”.

For Gandbhir, whose career has been defined by giving voice to the marginalized and holding systems accountable, “The Perfect Neighbor” represents both her most personal and perhaps most powerful work—a film born from grief that demands we confront uncomfortable truths about justice, race, and the laws that claim to protect us but too often fail those who need protection most.

The Perfect Neighbor Directed by: Geeta Gandbhir Produced by: Alisa Payne, Geeta Gandbhir, Nikon Kwantu Executive Producers: Sam Pollard, Soledad O’Brien, Rose Arce, Takema Robinson Runtime: 96 minutes Now streaming on Netflix.

This story was aggregated by AI from several news reports and edited by American Kahani’s News Desk.