OSCARS 2026: The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

True crime media is undeniably an industry now. If you are interested in real life stories of murder, disappearances, or other criminal activities, there's more hours of content about it than one human could ever hope to consume over their entire lifetime. Every streamer service under the sun, it would seem, has to crank out a new documentary or mini-series on some serial killer, missing person case, or bizarre story. Most of these are not worthy of much comment. To learn that Netflix used generative A.I. in some of their recent true crime docs is not at all surprising. However, occasionally, one will rise to the top of the pack. I started to hear buzz around “The Perfect Neighbor” sometime last year, as a better-than-most example of its genre. Now, the film has been extra validated by picking up an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature, the Academy rarely recognizing flicks of this nature. Let's dive deeper, shall we? 

In a small neighborhood in Ocala, Florida, Ajike “AJ” Owens lived with her four sons. The kids would often play in the street and various yards near-by, in the rowdy way kids do. This was greatly offensive to Owens' neighbor, an elderly white woman named Susan Lorincz. Susan would often chastise the kids for being on her property, despite the contested strip of land not even belonging to her. She was seen spewing profanity, and using racial slurs, against the boys from time to time. She would often call and report the supposed trespasses to the police, who were obligated to investigate. Each time, Susan's version of events were usually more dramatic and violent than what others recalled. On June 2nd of 2023, Susan would take a tablet away from one of Owens' sons after another incident of her harassing the children. When Ajike knocked on her door, angrily asking the tablet be returned, Lorincz shot her through the locked entrance. Owens would later die from her injuries. The police would be slow to prosecute Lorincz as they were uncertain if she acted within Florida's controversial – to say the least – Stand Your Ground laws.

I think the main reason “The Perfect Neighbor” proves to be such a compelling documentary is simple enough: We've all known a Susan. Before the woman's aggression turn violent, the kids accurately identify her as a “Karen.” The smallest, most innocent infractions seem to her to be great injustices. She is quick to anger and quick to demand a legal response for these “crimes.” Most pressingly, she is always the victim in her own eyes. When she apparently drives her pick-up truck through a gate, and the cops confront her about this, she brings up an unrelated incident of being sexually assaulted years before. Susan knows her reactions are unreasonable. This is why she exaggerates the events to be more outrageous, claiming a tiny child tried to put a large dog into her truck or that Owens was threatening to kill her. This is what makes women like Susan so infuriating: They refuse to budge on any disagreement and must always be observed as the victimized party. When the police tell the woman that she's been charged with manslaughter, she refuses to move from her seat. She simply doesn't want to obey because, in her mind, how could she ever possibly be the offender? 

Susan Lorincz is clearly a mentally unwell person. Sometimes she seems scatterbrained when questioned, though one suspect this might be an act. Her history of repeated anti-social behavior suggests something is wrong with her wiring. At the same time, I also think Susan knew exactly what she was doing. After firing the shots that killed Owens, she called the police, sobbing and saying she feared for her life... Before her voice goes smug and calm as she mentions that the kids were “always leaving their shit in” her yard. When the cops ask if she had researched Florida's Stand Your Ground laws at all, she unconvincingly flip-flops in her answer. When questioned about using a racial slur against the boys, she half-asses a response that she might have said that but, surely, she had a good cause to. I think Lorincz' intense fixation on the Owens' kids wronging her points to some degree of mental illness. 

However, one truly has to wonder: Would she had reacted so violently if the Owens had been a white family? This is another aspect that is so infuriating about Susan and people like her. There is an undeniable element of racial entitlement to their petty grievances. The reasons white people see any person of color innately as a threat or a potential criminal are varied and complex. Regardless, the sheer amount of anger and outrage people like Susan Lorincz and George Zimmerman reserve for anyone with darker skin color than them is an unavoidable factor. White kids merely existing on the same street as her seem unlikely to have inspired Lorincz to the same level of violent reaction. She must not merely be "protected" from other races. The fact that they live in the same neighborhood as her at all is offensive enough. 

“The Perfect Neighbor” is composed largely out of footage recorded from police body-cams, with little additional footage or voice-over narration guiding the story. This creates a sense that we are witnesses to these events as they play out. It sets up the mundane quality of the location. Susan's first interactions with the Owens family are almost comical. She's such a ridiculous figure, her anger so obviously unreasonable, that one can't take her seriously. The cops don't either, laughing about how often she calls them. Once the shots are fired, however, “The Perfect Neighbor's” approach gives us a heartbreaking front row seat to the aftermath. To see her kids panic and cry as their mother is injured or to hear their father grimly admit that mama won't be coming home, it causes an ache in your chest. To hear the eldest son blame himself, because his tablet was the one stolen, makes you wish you were there to comfort the child. 

It's difficult not to be wrapped up in emotions when watching “The Perfect Neighbor.” Susan Lorincz is such a despicable villain, the motivations for her actions so common and familiar, her refusal to admit responsibility or recognize her own prejudices so enraging. Seeing four young kids separated from their beloved mother so senselessly produces such an immediate emotional response. What truly elevates “The Perfect Neighbor” is the uncomfortable questions it forces you to ask. The film treats the police fairly neutrally yet their inability to recognize the clear mental imbalances in Lorincz means they hold some responsibility. So do the vile lack of gun control laws in this country, where something with Lorincz' history would have access to a firearm in the first place. Before the credits role, the film acknowledges that an overwhelming majority of shooters in Stand Your Ground cases in Florida have been light-skinned and their victims usually a darker color. To look at the facts of this sad, distressing case is to look at the number of factors that lead up to it. As long as we have a lack of easily accessed mental health resources, an excess of guns, and a deeply ingrained racism in this culture, crimes like these will continue to happen. 

Susan Lorincz ultimately went to jail for killing Ajika Owens. As “The Perfect Neighbor” wraps up, we see the trial playing out in quick snippets. When the verdict is read, Lorincz' facial expression is one of anger and snideness. As if even the weight of going to prison for 25 years, likely the rest of her life, still isn't enough for her to realize that some kids being on her lawn doesn't vindicate her actions. I hope the Owens family are able to heal from their mental wounds in time. I hope, some day, events such as these no longer occur. I even hope that Susan Lorincz realizes the gravity of what she's done eventually. What is most upsetting about “The Perfect Neighbor” is how difficult that last scenario is to imagine. It's a well assembled film that prompts big questions and big feelings and bring. [8/10]