2025 | rated R | directed by Geeta Gandbhir | 1 hr 36 mins | 3 out of 5 stars |
The Netflix documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, is a compelling, ultimately tragic story, notable for how it’s told – exclusively through body cam footage from the police involved in the matter. The story follows the escalating tension between neighbors on a suburban street in Florida. Our main antagonist – in the most literal sense of the word – is Susan Lorincz, an elderly recluse who constantly calls the police on the neighborhood kids for making noise, “threatening her”, throwing balls around and generally being kids in the street. We see different police officers getting dragged out in the day or middle of the night to investigate the latest grievance from Lorincz until one day tensions run high, a gun is pulled and someone ends up dead.
Because Geeta Gandbhir assembles the film in its first 2/3rds out of body camera footage, it has a riveting fly-on-the-wall quality that lets us peer in on this little microcosm of humanity and does so without editorial. We get to know the neighborhood street and its residents very well. It’s objectively funny when the latest cop approaches that same sliding glass back door of Lorincz’s over and over for some ridiculous complaint. The neighborhood cannot solve its own problems and regularly needs the police to step in as Lorincz gets more and more reclusive, irrational and paranoid. She affects the voice of a terrified old woman over the phone to 911 dispatchers and then barks and growls like a monster when she doesn’t realize it’s a cop knocking on the other side of the door, a brief, chilling, moment in the film that gives us the only glimpse of what the neighbors are seeing every day.
This movie absolutely had me until it didn’t, and it lost me in a big way. Ultimately, Perfect Neighbor turns into a murder investigation that unfolds, at times in real-time, over the course of a night in which a child is left without a mother. The prime suspect, is exactly who we know it is. It’s during this sequence when you start to feel the knife twist of filmmaker manipulation. The movie stops cold, gets the camera right in the faces of those experiencing immediate grief and forces us to wallow in their pain and agony for protracted periods of time. It’s uncomfortable, sure, that’s what the movie wants, but it’s also not insightful and feels like we’re peaking in on a private moment in a real person’s life that feels like it should be up to them to dictate. And then the question arises, why are we being plunged so deep into a third act that becomes excessive, full- blown misery porn, and the answer comes as the film starts to editorialize its ultimate message.
Ok, here we go. Flip the races and these scenes aren’t shot the way they are. In their faces, making them look helpless. Flip the races and this movie isn’t made at all. This is a true-life tragedy turned into a propaganda film creating another brick in the wall of propaganda films designed to make the black community in America believe they are perpetual victims of a racist justice system. Gandbhir is being disingenuous and slimy in her manipulation here, particularly given how understanding the cops are shown to be in every encounter. And even more particularly with a last minute swivel into pretending the entire incident is the result of Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law. A popular target, but not nearly as interesting a story as what The Perfect Neighbor is actually about – people being so atomized that they live side-by-side and still form no community, unable to resolve their own problems themselves, resorting to using weapons and the power of the state to get between them and simply having a conversation with their neighbors.
Or maybe Susan Lorincz is just a lunatic.