Broadly speaking, there are two obvious ways to make a documentary about the dangers—and the damage already done—of the stand-your-ground laws that Florida has popularized since he adopted his own version in 2005.
The first would be a top-down, macro-political strategy that examined the pitfalls of applying the Castle Doctrine to a racially stratified country with more guns than people. It would start with the fact that homicide rates have increased eight percent in states where citizens have no obligation to retreat before using deadly force in response to a perceived threat to their lives, and from there it would isolate various examples to illustrate that 70 percent of the people killed in Florida’s stand-your-ground cases were not armed. That 79 percent of their killers could has retreated safely. That white-on-black murders are five times more likely to be considered “justified” than the other way around. (Data drawn from Rockefeller Institute of Government.) Such film Would offer a sober—if largely analytical—reminder of what its self-selecting audience already suspected about these laws.
It would be an understatement to say so Geeta Gandbhir’s “The perfect neighbor“Taking Other approach, just as it would be an understatement to say the film takes that approach to outrageous extremes. Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary is shot almost entirely by police body cameras and interrogation rooms. failures) by painting a microcosmic portrait of White America’s inability to parse between fear and anger.
Stand-your-mark laws are not even mentioned by name until the film is more than half over, because Gandbhir chooses to work the issue from the inside out, with the reality that you use the images that she uses viewers right into the heart of what in the end is a human issue. Indeed, a subjective camera has rarely been more damning than it is here — here, in an American Horror Story that doesn’t hinge on whether or not Susan Lorincz was actually in danger when she shot the unarmed neighbor who knocked on the front door, but rather whether or not Susan Lorincz believed She was in danger when the young black mother from across the street came to collect her son’s confiscated tablet.
In a country where the most powerful group of people have been made to feel permanently insecure, everyone else has good reason to fear for their lives. And that fear is only further legitimized by laws that allow fear itself to be a credible excuse for murder. Everyone in Lorincz’s quiet Ocala neighborhood knew she was afraid of the world outside her door, but they didn’t realize how afraid they should have been in return. Most of them thought only of the 60-year-old doctor—a doctor of what? – as a local nuisance. The children who played soccer on the common patch of grass in front of her house called her a “Karen,” to which Lorincz often responded by calling the police.
That so much of the film’s back story can be drawn from police comb Film is proof of how often Lorincz harangued the authorities. She was incensed by the sound of young people having fun on dull summer afternoons, and while viewers will understandably side with the police with the annoyed white lady over the group of loud black kids, it only takes a few noise complaints for the police to identify Lorincz as “a psycho.”
Perhaps the authorities would have taken more aggressive action if the shoe was on the other foot. Maybe the police would have asked if she owned a gun after it came out that she was experiencing violent panic attacks as a result of her sexual trauma. Maybe the people across the street would have been more on their way if it weren’t so common for the Susan Lorinczs of the world to call little kids the N-word just for playing too close to their truck.
Radiant with remarkable grace, Ajike laughs at everyone but the police the first time we see them question the mother of four about the woman across the street. Yes, she threw Lorincz’s “No Tresassing” sign in the neighbor’s general direction (Lorincz reacts like it was attempted murder), but the sign wasn’t even on Lorincz’s property to begin with. She knew that Lorincz was in no real danger from her or her children or from anyone else on their street, and she assumed that – despite her neighbor’s racist screams – the opposite was largely true as well. But Lorincz didn’t see things the same way in her addled mind, and on the night of June 2, 2023, she killed Owens for the crime of banging on her front door.
We see the news of Owen’s death spread through her community in body cam footage recorded by the police arriving on the scene; The immediate fallout from this eminently preventable tragedy is filtered through the same legal apparatuses that allowed it to happen in the first place. The camera is at once both objective and subjective – coldly unblinking but oriented entirely around human attention and movement.
The discerning indifference encoded in the body cameo collides with the intimate closeness of watching an officer tell Owen’s child’s father that she is gone and then listening (from mere inches away) as the man relays that message to his newly motherless child. The disparity between what the law allows from some and deprives others has rarely been made as devastating as it is here. “Are you hurt?”, a police officer asks one of Owen’s sons. “No,” he cries, “but my heart is broken.”
“The Perfect Neighbor” pivots from heartbreak to absurdity — to the outrage that attends it — as it shifts to focus on the aftermath of the murder, Gandbhir’s perspective expanding from body cameras to surveillance footage captured in the interrogation room at the Ocala police station. It is chilling to see Lorincz sitting in horror at what she has done; To see her exaggerates the threat Owens presented, downplays the vitriol of her own racism, and grossly misconstrues the timeline of events leading up to the murder. It’s even more chilling to see the detective let her walk free later that night, even though we understand her case is just beginning.
To some extent, Lorincz’s case is too specific to serve as a perfect synecdoche for the 79 percent of Florida’s stand-your-ground murders in which the assailant could have retreated. The situation had been brewing for months on end, and Lorincz was clearly suffering from a form of PTSD. But therein lies the power of Gandbhir’s decision to examine stand-your-mark laws through a pinhole: each crime has its own mess of extenuating circumstances, but all feel justified in the moment. To encourage citizens to be gun-toting arbiters of their own reality is to weaponize—too literally—the most dangerous prejudices they promote every day. It’s bad enough that we allow the police to do that, but it might be even worse to grant that power to someone who likes to think of themselves as the perfect neighbor.
Grade: B+
“The Perfect Neighbor” premiered in 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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