Overview:
Documentary filmmaker Geeta Gandhbir's poignant film, The Perfect Neighbor, has been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature category at the 98th Academy Awards to be held on March 15, 2026.
“I am like the perfect neighbor”
“I am peaceful. I am like the perfect neighbor. You barely ever see me.” – Susan Lorincz to a Florida Police Officer.
The Perfect Neighbor, a 90-minute documentary by Indian American filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir, tells the story of the lethal shooting of Ajike Owens by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz. Created almost entirely from police body camera footage, doorbell camera footage, and 9-1-1 recordings, the ‘revolutionary documentary’ depicts the days and months leading up to this tragedy. What makes the story particularly poignant is that Owens was a family friend. On the night of the murder, Gandbhir and her family were at the scene trying to support the family.
On June 2, 2023, an ordinary summer evening in a family-friendly neighborhood in Florida, where the voices of children playing outside were the norm, culminated in a night of horror when Susan Lorincz, “the perfect neighbor,” fatally shot Owens, a black woman and a mother of four children. Lorincz is currently serving a 25-year sentence for manslaughter in a Florida prison for shooting Owens from behind a closed door after a verbal altercation.
The film captures Lorincz’s increasing animosity toward the neighborhood’s black children, who played on an empty lot just beyond her property, and her frequently escalating calls to the police to complain about noise and them disturbing the peace.
Gandbhir’s narrative brings a raw immediacy to the unfolding events and heightens the feeling of anxiety and impending tragedy. It also gives viewers a chilling and unvarnished sense of what transpired.
“The Karen called!”
Karen. an archetype (pejorative) of an entitled, middle-aged woman who is perceived to be using her race or privilege against others.
The timeline of events stretches from a February 2022 call to the police (not Lorincz’s first) to the killing of Owens on June 2, 2023, and its immediate aftermath. Neighbors describe Lorincz as one who’s always “messing with people’s kids”, calling them slaves and other racial slurs, and repeatedly calling the police on them. Owens, on the other hand, is described as the model mom, one who was always with her kids, “someone who sacrificed for her children to have private school, football lessons, gymnastics, dance, everything.”
On August 10, 2022, the attending police officer says to Lorincz –
“I’d rather that kids be screaming, playing out here (on the empty neighborhood lot) ‘coz they’re having a good time rather than stealing cars and robbing people…”
On December 22, 2022, the attending officer says to his partner –
“If you check the history of dispatch from her phone number, this is non-stop.”
On March 14, 2023, the attending officer says to his partner –
“There comes a point when you just have to accept that you are living with a bunch of kids.”
His partner responds –
“She’s also the only one who ever calls.”
The fatal evening
On June 2, 2023, Lorincz got into an altercation first with Owen’s children, after which Owen knocked on her door several times, demanding that Lorincz come outside to talk to her. Lorincz called 9-1-1 and reported feeling threatened. Within two minutes of the 9-1-1 call, shots were fired through the closed door, hitting Owens. Viewers are left with the horrifying footage of her 14-year-old son frantically ringing the neighbor’s doorbell.
“Hey, call 911! She shot my mom! With a freaking gun!”
Soon after, a heartbroken dad breaks the news to his inconsolable children that their lives have just been upended by that bullet fired through the closed door.
Bewildered neighbors try to fathom the gravity of what transpired in their once peaceful, kid-friendly neighborhood.
“Football. That’s what they play over there”, one neighbor observes tearfully.
A double nomination for Gandbhir
Gandbhir, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, has a double nomination at this year’s Academy Awards. The Perfect Neighbor is nominated for the 2026 Academy Awards for Best Documentary (Feature), and her short film The Devil Is Busy is also nominated for the Best Documentary Short Film. In a Daily Show interview with Michael Kosta, she revealed that she came around to making The Perfect Neighbor as a personal response to the tragedy – she knew Ajike Owens.
Two months later, Gandbhir received about 30 hours of body camera footage through lawyers who had invoked the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out the footage. “We saw the lead-up to the crime in a beautiful multi-racial community and how one outlier weaponized racism and manufactured fear, emboldened by ‘stand your ground’ laws”, she told Kosta.
Stand Your Ground Laws
Incidentally, the controversial Stand Your Ground law, which allows the use of deadly force in self-defense, was sponsored in 2005 by former Florida State Senator Dennis Baxley from Ocala, Marion County, the same place where Ajike Owens was killed.
Since 2005, 30 states have Stand Your Ground laws, either through legislation or judicial decisions.
Over the years, these laws have also been linked to an 8% to 11% increase in monthly homicide rates and firearm-related deaths nationwide. Data from various studies has also shown evidence of racial disparity in how Stand Your Ground laws have impacted jury decisions or outcomes of cases. An Urban Institute study authored by John Roman finds that the shooting of a black person by a white person is found justifiable 17 percent of the time in states with stand-your-ground laws, while the reverse is deemed justifiable just over 1 percent of the time.
In the killing of Owens, this “shoot first” law could have been a factor, as is observed from the custodial interviews of Lorincz. It is clearly something that prevented the police from arresting her immediately after the shooting. Justice was finally served in this case, but as Gandbhir puts it, “It was bittersweet.”
The Perfect Neighbor is currently available to watch on Netflix.
The 98th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, March 15, at 4 p.m. PT at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. It will be broadcast live on ABC and streaming on Hulu.