On demand: "The Perfect Neighbor"

In 2023, an Oscar-nominated short by the experimentally-minded Bill Morrison wrestled an ultra-contemporary form of found footage into a whole new filmmaking syntax. Composed of surveillance-camera coverage of the build-up to and aftermath of a police shooting in a public space, Incident looked to CCTV for its longshots and officers' bodycam to provide its medium shots and close-ups. That short now seems like a trial run or test balloon for Geeta Gandbhir's The Perfect Neighbor, a full-length documentary now streaming on Netflix: here are the circumstances of another unnecessary death, this time in a domestic environment, which allows Gandbhir to add doorbell cameras to her list of visual sources. What we're watching over these 98 minutes is an everyday neighborhood feud, played out in Marion County, Florida as the world re-emerged from lockdown, which had tragic repercussions; what we take from it is an idea of America as an increasingly contested and hotheaded space. On one side of a spacious yet otherwise nondescript suburban street lived Ajike Owens, a Black thirtysomething whose four children enjoyed playing in that street, as is their right. On the other side, there lived one Susan Lorincz (white, fiftysomething, faintly troubled-seeming), whom the Owens kids came to nickname The Karen. The feud began in the autumn of 2022, as a simple boundary matter: Lorincz felt the Owens kids, and their various dogs, balls and toys, were infringing onto her grass, and felt obliged to repeatedly inform the authorities of these infringements; arguments and sign-tossing ensued, as the police cautioned all concerned to keep their cool, hold their tongue and mind their Ps and Qs. Matters escalated over the course of the following spring and summer, with cease-and-desist orders issued and reports of a snatched iPad. They ended decisively on the night of June 2, 2023, when Susan Lorincz fired a shotgun through the locked front door of her home, killing Ajike Owens.

The framing ensures we sense from an early stage that these are merely the bare bones of this case: what was caught on tape whenever the tape was given cause to run. We never see inside either home; we hear reports that Lorincz used the N-word, and later her muddled justification for using it, but we never personally hear her say it. (We may still have cause to wonder what news channel Susan Lorincz was watching.) Gandbhir and her editor, the marvellously named Viridiana Lieberman, enhance their soundtrack with later verbal statements from those who knew one or both parties, and the bodycam footage catches choice authenticating details in passing: the kids getting distracted from an officer's queries by the sudden discovery of dog poop ("there's so much!") or poo-pooing Lorincz's claims they had eyes on her pick-up truck ("I'm eleven!"). For the most part, however, The Perfect Neighbor really is just footage released into the public domain after a standard-issue FOI request. This makes the film a markedly different proposition from the bulk of Netflix's true-crime catalogue. Though starkly confrontational, getting us up close to the faces of angry grown-ups and upset children, it remains from first frame to last unadorned, bereft of any dressing up; Gandbhir, indeed, resists providing even such basic context clues as onscreen text, meaning it's sometimes not immediately clear what's happened, and what precisely the local PD have been called out to investigate. We're left in no doubt whatsoever, though, that these were an unseemly series of events, which never should have been allowed to go as far as they did, and only went in the direction they finally did because one of the parties had access to a firearm. Yet again, we see how the thoughts and prayers of America's NRA-bankrolled politicians are ultimately meaningless, at ground level, when presented with the deadly reality of a loaded gun.

Beyond that, however, the film remains a little more open to interpretation than perhaps it should have been. The Morrison short made starkly visible clear and preventable failures on the part of the beat cops working what was to become a crime scene, but I don't think Gandbhir's film does, unless I missed something. The officers called out this way are polite and professional, even-handed, continually de-escalating and more often than not friendly, although you sense even their patience wearing thin after the increasingly erratic Lorincz rams a gate with her truck; as one officer sighs to another, "there comes a point where you just have to accept you live with a bunch of kids". If Gandbhir intends to raise questions, those questions pertain to Florida's judiciary, whose Stand Your Ground rule (permitting gunowners to shoot in self-defence) may in theory have afforded Susan Lorincz an easier ride - yet, as this footage shows, she was still arrested, interrogated, prosecuted, convicted and eventually imprisoned for 25 years. So the film floats into an odd space: there may well be none more documentary all year - it's all raw feed, with the exception of some TV news coverage massaged into the closing moments - and yet what this footage ultimately communicates, beyond the given that this was a tragic death, feels ever so slightly abstract. The cool, hands-off approach means there's never much sense of a case being made; Gandbhir is as the prosecution lawyer who walks into the courtroom, deposits a stack of files on the jury benches, and then absents herself. Much of The Perfect Neighbor is fascinating at a human interest level - there's a reason it currently sits at #1 on the streamer's charts - and again as a formal exercise; there's also no denying that these cameras picked up those agitated molecules of fear and frustration, anger and suspicion that have been gathering in the air these past ten years. It's just that the film shows them back to us in the most dispassionate format imaginable.

The Perfect Neighbor is now streaming on Netflix.