The fascination with true crime predates streaming — and, in a way, it’s older than the very notion of modern entertainment. There’s something deeply unsettling about watching an “ordinary” person break the silent pact of civilization and cross the fragile line between irritation and crime, frustration and tragedy. The success of The Perfect Neighbor lies not only in its story, one sadly familiar to anyone aware of U.S. statistics, but also in its radical storytelling choice: no interviews, no reenactments, not a single frame shot for the film itself.

Everything we see is real footage — security cameras, cellphone videos, police recordings. Each fragment opens a window into the banality of a neighborly feud that ends in murder. There’s no editorial narrative pushing the viewer toward a side, no manipulative voiceover. Only the weight of facts. And it’s precisely that seemingly detached approach that makes the film so devastating.

Directed by Geeta Gandbhir — winner of the Best Directing award at Sundance — The Perfect Neighbor goes far beyond conventional true crime because it refuses to adopt the sensationalism that dominates the genre. The documentary organizes chaos instead of exploiting it. Gandbhir, who personally knew the victim’s family, turns what could have been an indignant outcry into an exercise in restraint and precision.

The story is that of Ajike “AJ” Shantrell Owens, a 35-year-old Black woman and mother of four, killed in June 2023 by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, in Florida. It’s a context that could happen anywhere: who hasn’t dealt with an annoying, complaining neighbor, often lonely, sometimes bitter? What’s shocking here is the crime itself, one that, in hindsight, seemed almost foretold, though no one truly saw it coming.

What we witness is a community marked by minor daily tensions — complaints, noise, suspicious glances. Lorincz frequently called the police, claiming that neighborhood children, including Owens’s kids, were trespassing on her lawn. The accumulation of these banal interactions culminated in a gunshot fired through a closed door. And, as Gandbhir shows with surgical clarity, that shot is not merely the climax of a personal feud, it’s the manifestation of a system that normalizes fear and legitimizes violence.

Some critics have described the film as “detached,” or even “unfair” to Lorincz. I disagree. The distance in The Perfect Neighbor is what makes it ethical. There’s no dramatization, but there is humanity, and a deep sadness. When we see Lorincz crying alone in the interrogation room, we don’t feel empathy, but rather the tragic dimension of moral collapse. The crime isn’t treated as an ending but as the inevitable result of microaggressions, fear, and prejudice.

What’s truly chilling, when the footage unfolds in real time, is realizing that Lorincz was walking toward the inevitable — surrounded by fear, loneliness, and bias. The reality she perceived, filtered through paranoia, was radically different from everyone else’s. That’s why Gandbhir’s choice to exclude interviews or commentary is a masterstroke. She forces us to watch, to confront the events without mediation or comfort. What emerges is a haunting portrait of American life, where Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, meant to protect self-defense, has become an alibi for armed prejudice.

The title The Perfect Neighbor carries both irony and pain — borrowed from Lorincz’s own words, as she once described herself as “the perfect neighbor” during her calls to the police. Her “perfection” is an illusion: that of a woman who thought she was defending her home, but instead destroyed a family and a community.

After the crime, Susan Lorincz was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, assault, and unlawful use of a firearm. She claimed she acted in self-defense, invoking Florida’s controversial law. Still, prosecutors rejected her justification, noting that Owens was unarmed and that the shots were fired through a locked door. Lorincz remains in custody awaiting trial, her case now a grim symbol of the legal loopholes that make racial violence so persistent — and so rarely punished.

Perhaps the documentary’s greatest strength is how it exposes what society still insists on normalizing: everyday racism, white paranoia, and the unequal weight of justice. There’s no happy ending, no closure. Only the void left by AJ Owens’s death — and the haunting question that remains: how many more stories like this must be told before they finally stop happening?

The Perfect Neighbor is, therefore, more than a true crime. It’s a mirror, a film about the collective failure of a society that has grown accustomed to living armed with fear. And in the end, the greatest horror isn’t the bullet itself, but everything that led to it.