What lingers most about The Perfect Neighbor is not only what it says about Stand Your Ground laws, prejudice, and the line between fear and hate, but how cleanly it builds those ideas from the ground up. Geeta Gandbhir designs the first hour almost entirely from police bodycam footage, and the choice is razor sharp. You learn the street’s geography in real time, you witness the tone and language of each call, and you feel the temperature rising as officers shuttle between a cluster of homes, a chorus of complaints, and a neighborly cold war that keeps renewing itself. The verité form is not a gimmick, it is the argument.
At the center is the months-long dispute between Susan Lorincz and the families next door, which culminates in Lorincz shooting Ajike Owens through a deadbolted door. The filmmakers let the footage speak, and it is damning in its banality. Lorincz calls 9-1-1 again and again, often to report children playing in a shared yard; officers repeatedly find no imminent threat, occasionally reminding her that kids at play are preferable to kids at risk elsewhere. When the worst happens, the bodycams capture the immediate aftermath with a clarity that is almost unbearable, from stunned relatives to shell-shocked neighbors trying to piece together what they just lost.
The film then shifts to the legal frame. Lorincz insists she acted in self defense, yet investigators, and later a jury, find that the shot was fired in anger, not fear. The verdict and 25-year sentence give The Perfect Neighbor a definitive arc, but Gandbhir refuses easy catharsis. Instead she returns to the tapes, to the rhythms of patrol work and paperwork, to the little frictions that metastasize when people outsource conflict resolution to the police and to headlines. The portrait is precise, not polemical.
Technically, the documentary is impeccable. The edit parcels out information the way responding officers would discover it, so you are always oriented, always aware of who is where and why that matters. The accumulation of small calls builds a case far more persuasively than a talking head ever could. Gandbhir’s personal connection to Ajike Owens, noted in the end credits, explains the film’s dual temperament, both rigorously composed and openly grieving. That balance keeps the movie from feeling opportunistic; it feels like stewardship.
READ MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: The Twits, Steve, It Was Just and Accident
There will be plenty written about The Perfect Neighbor as a policy text, and it earns that reading. What surprised me was how gripping it is as cinema, how the bodycam-first structure becomes a masterclass in point of view and how the final passages land with a thud of inevitability rather than the neatness of closure. This is a clear, careful, deeply felt work that honors Owens and insists on the value of ordinary de-escalation in a culture that keeps choosing escalation.
Score: 8/10
The Perfect Neighbor (2025)
- Director: Geeta Gandbhir
- Genre: Documentary, Thriller
- Runtime: 99 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: October 17, 2025
- Movies Like The Perfect Neighbor: This Place Rules, Girls State, The Pigeon Tunnel
Where to Watch The Perfect Neighbor (2025)
See all options for The Perfect Neighbor (2025)
