There’s no doubt that The Perfect Neighbor tells a tragic story. It’s a documentary about an incident that took place on June 2, 2023, in which Susan Lorincz, a resident of suburban Ocala, Florida, fatally shot her neighbour Ajike Owens. Lorincz had a history of calling local police to complain about children, including Owens’ children, playing in her street and in the empty lot next to her house. On the night of June 2, Owens came over to Lorincz’s house to confront her about bullying her children and Lorincz shot her fatally through the front door. At stake in the subsequent trial were Florida’s notorious stand-your-ground laws, which hold that a citizen can shoot to kill if they genuinely believe that their life is in danger.  There’s also a racial dimension to the shooting, since Susan is white and Owens is black. Lorincz would go on to be convicted of manslaughter in 2024 and sentenced to 25 years in prison while Owens’ death spurned anger and activism from both the African American community and advocates for gun control. Most dramatically, Owens’ children were left without their mother and the footage of them, both in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and at Owens’ memorial, is utterly traumatic and almost unbearable to watch.

There’s no doubt, then, that this is a tragedy and that it shouldn’t have happened. Nevertheless, I felt uneasy with the way that director Geeta Gandbhir presents it, along with the way that the police narrative of Lorincz’s behaviour evolves. The two are intimately entwined because The Perfect Neighbor is entirely comprised of official police footage – mainly bodycam footage but also some footage from Lorincz’s subsequent interrogation. This footage paints a very particular version of events, in which Lorincz is a racist Karen who simply has it out for her neighbours – and it’s quite possible that this is exactly how things played out. But it’s notable that, for all the apparent objectivity of the bodycam format, we only ever see the aftermath of the events that she and her neighbours describe, which is to say that we only ever see Lorincz’s aggression without any direct access to the events that precipitated it. Moreover, the neighbours routinely ridicule her version of events and the police more or less subscribe to their story from the outset, meaning that the film feels like an object lesson in police managing their own image, at the possible expense of nuance.

All of that is to say that this is a very different kind of Netflix bodycam documentary from, say, 2020’s American Murder: The Family Next Door. In that film, which detailed the investigation into Chris Watts’ annihilation of his family, the bodycam felt like a genuinely revelatory device, alive to all the eerie inconsistencies of Watts’ story from the moment police first entered his house in response to his report that his family was missing. By contrast, The Perfect Neighbor belongs to a new bodycam era, one in which the lesson of George Floyd means that police are hyper-aware of the way their personal footage might be used against them in a court of law. What seems like a transparent visual field of bodycam footage thus often feels like a mode of obfuscation here, or least an exercise in image management, in which the police officers quickly realise that the best way to extricate themselves from any future complicity is to assume that Lorincz is a racist Karen – to weaponize the Karen discourse against her. Again, she may well be a Karen, but the arguments for this often come down to the simple fact of her not having a family, living alone as an older woman, and clearly suffering from some significant mental health issues.

To that end, the cops tell the kids and their families, from the outset, that they intend to align with their narrative. One cop actually says to the kids that “I want to make you guys look like the good guys” and several of the cops refer to Lorincz as a Karen pretty early in the piece. Another cop jokes with one of the kids about bringing him fireworks so that they can disturb Lorincz even more on New Year’s Eve. Conversely, the cops never question the parents about why their kids are left outside at night without supervision. They also don’t seem attuned to the nature of ragebaiting, in which people can drastically trigger someone with mental health issues by performing apparently insignificant acts. One white male cop, in particular, seems desperate to ingratiate himself with one of the black male residents of the neighbourhood – or to manage his own image in case the bodycam footage is ever used for precisely this kind of forensic cinematic exercise. Of course, there’s a good chance that their fist bump is a completely sincere act from the cop’s perspective, just as there’s a good chance that Lorincz actually is a Karen and that everything occurs in exactly the way the film claims. Yet we never see anything other than this official narrative, which to me played out as an exercise in prospective bodycam PR from cops who probably should have tried to mediate the situation with a little more sensitivity about events they hadn’t directly seen.

My suspicion of the police involvement and the entire film only grew with the depiction of Lorincz’s interrogation. Here, the main argument that the police give for her being charged with manslaughter is that she has killed a mother: “A mother has lost her life for being a mother.” Of course, that’s a horrific event, and Lorincz may well be guilty of manslaughter, but there’s a more tacit sense here that stand-your-ground laws are only legitimate if they are being used to defend one’s family, to the point that I found myself wondering how the case might have played out if Lorincz had happened to have a child of her own in the house on the night that she shot Owens, regardless of whether she was actually defending herself. At times this produces some real contradictions, most notably the tension between the claim that Lorincz’s neighbours never antagonised her and the chief of police’s justification of their antangonism, since he’d also be “pissed off” if someone threw something at one of his own kids, as Lorincz was held to have done. This reflects a deeper contradiction in the way that the film handles stand-your-ground laws as both utterly crazy and only justified when a family’s hearth and home is being defended – at least, for the investigators, there seems to be an unbearable cognitive dissonance when stand-your-ground laws are dissociated from family values. Beyond a certain point, Lorincz seems to be being punished for simply knowing what the law is, as the figure of the Karen becomes an emblem of everything wrong with a system in which the police themselves also participate, making sense, perhaps, of why they are so prepared to reduce the complexities of this case, the unravelling of the social fabric that plays out in the background, to her singular monstrosity.

For this is, ultimately, a film about the dissolution of the social compact in an America wracked by Covid, the first Trump presidency and a mounting sense of unbridgeable divides. Even if we accept the worst possible version of Lorincz’s actions, there’s clearly an element of provocation from her neighbours, who permit their children to both play very late at night and in very close proximity to her house. Anybody who has lived close to other people knows that the question of ambient noise falls just shy of legal enforceability and is instead a matter of good faith – as one of the cops tells Lorincz, it’s a “civil issue,” impossible to fully regulate and so dependent upon the unspoken social bonds that hold communities together. Likewise, anybody who has lived with a neighbour who breaks that social contract knows that sustained noise, over time, can be a form of low-level torture. In that sense, the neighbours’ retorts about the technicalities of property lines are a little moot, since what is at stake is ambient noise, the fluid ways that domestic lives interweave when they adjoin one another. None of that is to say that this torture in any way justifies Lorincz’s actions but it does feel like a critical piece of the puzzle that the police narrativise away from the outset either precisely because it’s so difficult to police or because the optics of appearing to assist a Karen might come back to bite them later on. One police officer notes that it’s better for kids to be outside than robbing stores or on TikTok, and that about sums up the investigative response, which to me seemed to sidestep the intricacies of the conflict and, in doing so, to lose a real opportunity to curb Lorincz’s growing irascibility and desperation.

Given that what the film is ultimately litigating is the level of Lorincz’s fear – reasonable fear is the critical ingredient for a stand-your-ground defence – I came away from The Perfect Neighbor with an uneasy feeling of distrust that made me wonder whether this was in some sense a symptom of our Trumpian moment rather than a deconstruction of it. Americans live in a world in which concrete binaries between different groups of people – black and white, old and young, married and unmarried, parents and childless – can sometimes turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I found myself wondering here whether Lorincz retreated into a Karen mentality partly because that was exactly how she was treated by the outset by a police force keen to preserve the most one-dimensional and socially sanitised narrative for posterity. In other words, I found myself questioning whether the one-dimensional simplicity of this Karen v. Neighbours narrative was, in its own way, as much about obfuscation as that of the officers charged with the murder of George Floyd. It reminded me of Tina Satter’s Reality, which uses the verbatim transcript of the arrest and interrogation of Reality Winner to suggest something unsavoury lurking beneath the surface of bureaucratic transparency. And it has to be said, too, that there are clearly mental health issues taking place with Lorincz which, while in no way exonerating her from a possible murder, do take the edge off the interrogation scenes – they may not be as bad as those of Brendan Dassey in Making a Murderer but they certainly exist on a spectrum. My take, then: this felt like a case where the police were more focused on bodycam posterity than genuine engagement, such that the film itself finally feels queasily complicit in their spurious self-justification.