The Perfect Neighbor, a new Netflix true crime documentary that premiered at Sundance earlier this year, examines a devastating incident that exposes the fractures of contemporary American life. It portrays a small community coming apart under the pressures of paranoia, racism and gun culture — issues that remain deeply embedded across the country.
Using body-cam footage from dozens of police visits, The Perfect Neighbor bears witness to a tight-knit Florida neighbourhood terrorised by one woman’s relentless harassment. That hostility ultimately takes a fatal turn and the film captures, with horrifying intimacy, how a slow-burning grievance becomes a tragedy.
At the centre of the story is Susan Lorincz, a middle-aged white woman who lives alone in one of the duplexes on a modest suburban street filled with rental homes. Lorincz believes she has full ownership of the grassy area beside her home. She doesn’t. Yet she repeatedly harasses her neighbours and calls the police, insisting that people are trespassing, threatening her safety or endangering her peace of mind.
Lorincz embodies a distinctly American pathology: the collision of anger, entitlement and firearms. The Perfect Neighbor traces the fatal culmination of her persecutory delusions — a mind consumed by suspicion and grievance until fantasy hardens into bullets.
Lorincz’s world feels small and airless. Every sound from next door becomes an assault; every child’s laugh a provocation. Her psyche folds in on itself, clutching righteousness like a gun. She exhibits a persecutory personality — the mind’s desperate attempt to maintain control by projecting its own hostility outward.
The “threat” she perceives is internal, displaced into the bodies of others. Ajike “AJ” Owens, the black mother who becomes her victim, and Owens’ children were simply caught in the crosshairs of Lorincz’s mental disarray.
The film’s uniqueness lies in how it’s constructed. Rather than rely on interviews or stylised re-creations, the documentary uses an enormous archive of police body-cam footage spanning two years. It strings together the story of repeated interactions between Lorincz, the Owens family and other neighbours.
The effect is chillingly direct. We’re not told what happened — we see it unfold in real time, from the clipped professionalism of responding officers to the suffocating familiarity of repeated 911 calls.
Watching it was absolutely devastating. The sheer persistence of this one woman’s insistence that she was always right — and always the victim — felt unbearable. Over time, it becomes clear that even the police no longer believe her.
Unaffiliated neighbours up and down the street corroborate a version of events completely at odds with Lorincz’s claims. The gap between her self-image and reality widens until the inevitable rupture.
The asinine presumptive privilege this woman operates under is astonishing. The arrogance is incandescent. From the tone of her voice to the growing frequency of her calls, you sense that something catastrophic is bound to happen.
But since I hadn’t known this case before, it was still a shock to hear the escalating calls and then watch the footage unfold. A 911 dispatch, an officer recognising the address, the same caller again — and then, finally, the moment she reports having fired her gun through a closed door.
The film draws its quiet horror from exactly that: the way paranoia metastasises in the most banal spaces of suburbia. A front door becomes a fortress; a neighbour becomes a sworn enemy. Lorincz’s delusions don’t arise in isolation — they’re reinforced by a broader cultural permission structure, the American mythology of self-defence and the “stand your ground” rhetoric that launders fear through the language of legality.
One of the documentary’s strengths lies in the quality of its footage. The body-cams capture everything in high resolution — no grainy ambiguity, no convenient distance. We can see facial expressions, nervous tics and gestures. Lorincz’s detached disdain, her smugness, the faint smirk that crosses her face during interrogations — they’re all revoltingly visible.
I’m grateful that the filmmakers also include extended interrogation footage. So often in true crime documentaries, we watch police resort to manipulation or intimidation to extract confessions. Here, the officers are calm, patient, almost eerily composed. They don’t press; they simply wait and let her dig her own hole. Watching her attempt to rationalise the irrational is one of the film’s most disturbing elements.
Yet beneath all the pathology and politics lies a profound tragedy. Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old mother of four, is portrayed with grace and restraint. Her story anchors the film’s fury. She’s not mythologised as a saint or flattened into a statistic — she’s a real woman who wanted peace, justice and safety for her children. Her absence fills the screen more than Lorincz’s presence ever could. She becomes the film’s moral centre, exposing the psychic collapse surrounding her.
When the documentary reaches its final quarter, we see the consequences of Lorincz’s actions. The moment she’s informed of her charges, her expression barely flickers. There’s a smirk — a dismissive, chilling smirk — as if none of it matters, as if she’s merely removed someone she considered lesser. That single gesture made my blood boil. It’s the kind of scene that stays under your skin long after the credits roll.
What makes The Perfect Neighbor effective is its refusal to editorialise. The footage speaks for itself. There’s no narrator, no omniscient voice guiding our interpretation. We’re left to witness, to sit with the horror of what ordinary fear can become when fed by entitlement and protected by law.
