‘The Perfect Neighbor’: Sundance Review

Dir: Geeta Gandbhir. US. 2025. 97mins 

A chilling documentary that, in its personal sombre, subdued method, encapsulates most of the ills affecting the US, The Good Neighbor incorporates police bodycam footage and regulation enforcement interrogations to recount a 2023 deadly capturing in Florida that challenged that state’s controversial ‘stand your floor’ regulation. Over the course of 16 months, tensions escalate between a middle-aged white girl and the largely Black kids who play in her neighbourhood, the verbal standoff ultimately resulting in homicide. Director Geeta Gandbhir makes use of this present materials to inform a tragic story that touches on America’s seemingly intractable struggles with racism, gun violence and psychological well being. 

A damning portrait of an America wherein Black individuals face an unequal justice system

The movie screens as a part of Sundance’s US Documentary Competitors, and the well timed material ought to assure additional pageant play and theatrical distribution. The 2023 killing of Black mom of 4 Ajike “AJ” Owens by her neighbour Susan Lorincz – who mentioned she believed Owens was going to kill her – made nationwide information, however even these conversant in the incident must be riveted. And whereas the nonfiction streaming house is overstuffed with melodramatic true-crime sequence full of regulation enforcement footage, Gandbhir’s movie, deftly edited by Viridiana Lieberman, eschews the style’s most salacious cliches. 

A lot of the movie is seen by way of the attitude of the smudgy, barely fisheye digital cameras that American regulation enforcement put on on their chests. Beginning in February 2022, cops had been dispatched to Lorincz’s house pretty steadily, to attend her fixed complaints that the neighbours’ kids had been trespassing on her property. When the police converse to her after which the kids (and their dad and mom), they hear wildly completely different tales. The neighbours adamantly insist that Lorincz is definitely the instigator, swearing on the youngsters and even hurling racial epithets. (In addition to, the kids are usually not trespassing as a result of she doesn’t personal the open area the place they play.) 

These seemingly repetitive police encounters with Lorincz begin to develop into unnerving, as her anger begins to really feel irrational and harmful. The extra the Black residents clarify her baseless accusations and erratic behaviour — at one level, they are saying, she was standing outdoors brandishing a firearm — the extra audiences will surmise that this girl isn’t simply mistaken, however can also be racially biased in her complaints. Then, throughout a later confrontation with police, Lorincz mentions needing medicine and makes a imprecise reference to having been raped prior to now. With the verite-like camerawork providing a viewpoint that’s queasily unfiltered and uncooked, it turns into clear one thing horrible goes to transpire earlier than the deadly capturing happens.

Gandbhir, who has received two Emmys for modifying and co-directed the 2017 documentary I Am Proof, lets the footage converse for itself, permitting the story’s inherent drama and social commentary to slowly emerge. Equally, Laura Heinzinger’s understated rating and sound design improve the sense of dread and sorrow with out turning into manipulative. The Good Neighbor’s sombrely goal method invitations audiences to find how this tragedy unfolded and speculate what, if something, might have prevented it. 

The documentary is very pointed in its examination of Florida’s ’stand your floor’ regulation, which argues that defendants can declare they wielded lethal pressure just because they believed they had been in peril. Gandbhir presents a damning portrait of an America wherein Black individuals face an unequal justice system and, as a closing title card signifies, are a lot much less prone to be acquitted when invoking this similar regulation. And whereas The Good Neighbor by no means makes use of this as an excuse, Lorincz’s claims of struggling sexual abuse and psychological sickness add one other darkish wrinkle to this unhappy story — why was somebody so apparently unwell allowed to have a gun within the first place? 

Such painful questions stay unanswered as The Good Neighbor reaches its finale, which options footage from Lorincz’s trial. However Gandbhir is much less within the particulars of this particular crime than she is within the predictability of its contours, her no-frills method ephasising the despairing familiarity of the paranoia, bigotry and violence coursing by way of too many American neighbourhoods.