What is a neighbor?
An essay about what we can learn from a horrifying incident everyone seems closer and closer to experiencing these days.
And a bit of advice.
Christian McNamara, February 24, 2026
The Perfect Neighbor, filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir’s devastating new Netflix documentary, begins near the end of its story, with footage from the chaotic aftermath of an unspeakable horror the likes of which have become numbingly routine in this country. On June 2, 2023, an Ocala, Florida woman named Susan Lorincz fired a shot through her locked and dead-bolted front door, killing her neighbor Ajike Owens as she stood outside with her ten-year-old son beside her. Exploring how a series of seemingly minor neighborhood disputes could ultimately escalate into such a senseless act of violence is the work of Gandbhir’s film.
That Gandbhir is capable of exploring these early disputes so deeply is itself a sad commentary on life in contemporary America. Since the disputes’ tragic significance is apparent only in hindsight, there were no film crews on hand to capture the escalating conflict or its terrible denouement. Rather, the film consists almost entirely of footage captured by the body cameras of deputies responding to incidents—at first trivial, finally deadly—between Lorincz and her neighbors. Thus, a tool introduced to promote greater transparency and accountability in the wake of high-profile police shootings becomes the mechanism through which the viewer is immersed in the events with which the film is concerned as they unfold in real time. This approach creates an immediacy that is simply not possible in a more traditional documentary. By the film’s end, we are left feeling as if we could have been called to testify at Lorincz’s trial.
Enough body camera footage exists to populate an entire documentary because in the months leading up to the shooting, Susan Lorincz routinely contacted the Marion County Sherriff’s Office to complain about the children in her neighborhood. An empty field near Lorincz’s duplex in which the children energetically play football becomes a particular flashpoint. Much of what causes Lorincz’s ire seems like pretty typical kid stuff, and the deputies dispatched to the scene over and over and over again largely treat it as such. In one of the few lighter moments in an otherwise harrowing watch, a deputy tells a group of children that he’d “rather see you guys outside playing than on them TikToks.”
We get only hints of what may (or may not) be lurking underneath Lorincz’s frustration with her neighbors and her apparent inability to address it in some way more constructive than constantly calling the cops. She comes across in the film as a troubled woman. In conversations deputies have with Lorincz and then her neighbors, there are allusions to sexual assault, medication and potential mental illness. But there is also evidence of racism. Lorincz is white. Many of her neighbors (including Ajike Owens and her four children) are black. During her interrogation after the shooting, Lorincz acknowledges that it’s possible she let racial slurs “slip” while yelling at the children. This on top of a barrage of other forms of verbal abuse neighbors allege Lorincz regularly subjected their children to, several of which Lorincz does not dispute.
And then one awful summer evening, the long-simmering tension explodes into violence. According to neighbors, a once-again fuming Lorincz threw a pair of roller stakes at a group of children and took a tablet from one of Owens’s sons. Shortly after an outraged Owens began banging on Lorincz’s door, Lorincz shot blindly through it, striking Ajike in the chest. Lorincz would later claim that she feared for her life, setting up an attempt to rely on Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law as a defense. Gandbhir is interested in the effects of “Stand Your Ground”—a title card at the end of the film asserts that the law has been responsible for approximately 700 additional deaths per year—but the film focuses more on the people than on the politics and is much richer for it.
One of the things that becomes clear after spending time with Lorincz and her neighbors is that they have very different ideas about what it means to be a good member of a community. The film takes its title from a statement that Lorincz makes during a call to deputies. She describes herself as “the perfect neighbor—you barely ever see me.” The cruel irony, of course, is that we already know Lorincz is anything but. Yet for many Americans, there is nothing to fault in Lorincz’s definition of neighborliness, just in her failure to live up to it. Had she in fact made herself invisible, she would indeed have been the perfect neighbor.
A very different conception of community is offered up by one of Lorincz’s neighbors. Surveying the throng of kids playing happily all around him, he tells deputies that he looks after them as if they were his own. The decline of this more traditional notion of neighborliness—one rooted in being present instead of being invisible—helps explain the isolation, mistrust, and lack of empathy plaguing our society today. As The Perfect Neighborillustrates, the results can sometimes be lethal.
The Perfect Neighbor does not make for easy viewing. Footage of Owens’s children being informed that their mother has not survived is particularly gutting. But it is important that we not look away. And while in a better world Netflix would have to answer in the court of popular opinion for its own role in causing Americans to retreat from the public square into the cocoons of their individual homes, in this case the silver lining of the platform’s ubiquity is that The Perfect Neighbor is widely available. One hopes that viewers take advantage of the opportunity, and that having done so, they then switch off their screens and head out into the neighborhood.