★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Shut up. Don’t tell me you don’t watch documentaries. You have to watch “The Perfect Neighbor” on Netflix. Not only is it the Oscar favorite to win that category. It’s also the scariest movie you’ll see this Halloween season even though it’s not a traditional horror movie.
So what is it? It’s a true-crime doc about a white Florida woman who shot and killed her neighbor, Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four in 2023, told exclusively through footage from police body cameras. The shooter is Susan Lorincz, 60, who often complained about Owens’ kids and others playing in a vacant lot near her home in Ocala, Florida. In 2024, Lorincz was found guilty of manslaughter with a firearm and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.
End of story? Not a bit. That’s why “The Perfect Neighbor” sticks in your memory and resonates in your nightmares. It’s not one case; it’s a portrait of our society within one tragic incident that shouldn’t have happened and didn’t have to happen and yet will be repeated continuously until we wake up to what’s happening in our own backyards.
Here’s the scariest movie you’ll see this Halloween season even though it’s not a traditional horror movie and every word of it is true.
“The Perfect Neighbor” starts with a message from the film’s creator Geeta Gandbhir, who won a well-deserved prize for directing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: “This film is primarily composed of police body camera footage recorded over two years.” And that’s what it is. There’s no editorializing. No slanted narration. We see what the police saw and heard before, during and after the killing.
It starts in August 2022 in Ocala with kids enjoying a warm day. That’s when Lorincz, the local “Karen” (slang for angry middle-aged white women), shouts racial slurs at the kids and calls the cops about trespassing. It’s the first of many calls we’ll hear, with the police basically letting things go. What harm could she do?
Plenty, as it turns out, when on that fateful night in June, Ajike and her 10-year-old son come to Susan’s door to settle a squabble. Without opening it to have a conversation, Susan shoots through her door, ultimately killing Ajike.
The older woman claimed she feared for her life, citing the Stand-Your-Ground law in Florida and 37 other states where you can use lethal force if you feel your life is endangered. That defense made headlines when George Zimmerman, a white man, shot unarmed Black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
That Susan, of fragile mind since an incident of sexual abuse in her youth, could weaponize her rage through lenient gun laws, is a larger extension of the case at hand. When Susan accuses a child and his friends of trying to steal her truck, one kid says, “We’re 11.” Yeah, and it’s on the faces of children where this film writes its most potent message.
In a devastating sequence caught on police cam, the father of the Owens children arrives, visibly shaken at the news of her death, and then must rally himself in order to inform his children of the loss of their mother.
It’s moments like this that put a human face on the legal issues being argued in the case and turn “The Perfect Neighbor”—as Lorincz ironically called herself—into an indictment of a system that upholds the racial quicksand of “Stand Your Ground” and the police neglect that allowed such bigotry to fester. Prepare to be shaken.