Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Though the jury did not, the camera condemned the men who murdered Emmett Till. When they circulated in Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender, the photographs of Till’s mutilated corpse, insisted upon by his mother, inflamed discourse across America. Decades later, so too would the videos of the attacks on Rodney King and then George Floyd: the first, documented by a local man using his new camcorder; the latter, captured by a teenaged witness on her phone—both works of disturbing durée, insurrectionary in their effect.

The Perfect Neighbor is also a shocking chronicle of a hate crime—an especially senseless one, if a metric can be applied to such things—against a Black American: the murder of Ocala, Florida, resident Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old mother of four, by one of her neighbors, Susan Lorincz, a 58-year-old white woman. It happened one June evening of 2023—the climax of an ongoing dispute between Lorincz and the local parents and their children, most of them Black, over nothing more than the kids’ proclivity to gambol on the grass near her property. Owens had come to Lorincz’s home to address the latest chapter in this suburban saga—her son claimed that she had taken his iPad and thrown a roller skate at him—but Lorincz would not open her front door. (You might well ask, who is the childish one in this situation?) Instead, she fired off a shot from her .38-caliber pistol, which bore through the door and into Owens’s chest. Owens died with her 10-year-old son by her side.

The incident was a flashpoint in the ongoing debate around “stand your ground” laws. Currently in effect in some form in the majority of the nation’s states, they allow for a person’s use of deadly force in the face of a significant threat, even without first making an attempt to retreat. Trayvon Martin too was a victim of Florida’s “stand your ground” laws; nationwide, they are used disproportionately to justify the killing of Black people. The Perfect Neighbor makes of Owens’s murder a mordant case-in-point.

Eschewing the use of talking heads or a slate of statistics, director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the narrative largely from police bodycam footage—arguably the true crime idiom of the 2020s, taking the premise of Cops (1989–present) to its optimized conclusion: law enforcement is the camera crew. Perhaps you have stumbled upon, or had some cause to seek out, this particular vertiginous nook of YouTube: as a rule, such videos bear odorously descriptive titles like “Cops Find Man with Dementia in Bed with Dismembered Body” (13,571,041 views) or “Florida Teen Admits To Raping 91-Year-Old Woman” (4.9 million views); they can stretch to the length of a feature film. In less than eight minutes, you can also learn “How to Make A VIRAL Police BodyCam Channel” from a spiky-haired, AI-generated avatar, who will tell you how to obtain the necessary footage via the Freedom of Information Act (25,300 views). While The Perfect Neighbor is not of this species—it is structured artfully, and clearly in the service of an imperative greater than generating clicks—it still bears mentioning that it’s being distributed by that other bottomless true crime repository, Netflix.

It opens with dashcam footage of a cop car purring into action after the call comes through—“Somebody’s been shot!”—and barreling towards the crime scene, the streets a riot of colors in the sirens’ glare. But this sequence, with its adrenaline-pumping pitch, lasts only a couple of minutes: The Perfect Neighbor is less concerned with the spectacle of present-tense brutality than with the anatomy of the murder, sociologically speaking. It is about the before and the after; the horror of its animating event need not be litigated here.

Lorincz seems a villain in an altogether different mold than the short-fused brutes in blue who beat King and killed Floyd. Her insistence on calling the cops at the slightest perceived infringement upon “the peaceful, quiet enjoyment of [her] property”—not really a criminal matter at all—suggests a hands-off comportment, a determination to outsource authority. This priggish habit earned her the nickname “the Karen” among the local kids—what are cops but the legal system’s middle managers? For her part, Lorincz describes herself as “like, the perfect neighbor” . . . “I’m peaceful, I’m quiet … you barely ever see me.” The deputies she’s summoned to her residence for the umpteenth time are unconvinced: trudging back down the drive, one of them remarks, “What a fuckin’—”—the recording cutting off before the inevitable expletive. Here, at least, local law enforcement figures as something like the voice of reason: with their asides, they form the Greek chorus of this modern tragedy. (And, as it happens, they’re about as ineffective in altering the narrative’s course.)

“Karen” may be a racialized term, but the names that Lorincz reportedly called the kids—for whom she saved the bulk of her petty venom, actually—are worse ones. Her bandying of the N-word (“It just slipped out,” she tells the detectives), among other rancid epithets, evidences the bigotry casually roiling at the heart of this neighborly dispute—Lorincz is not about to be canonized as another endearingly crackpot “Florida woman.” But The Perfect Neighbor suggests that Owens’s death was not really a product of “Black panic” or even simple opportunism, some combination of which could be argued to have fueled those earlier, landmark attacks on Black men. There is an air of malice aforethought, a level of cowardly calculation, to her selective Tourette’s—she kept her name-calling out of the range of adult ears, and so off camera—as much as her recurrent fabulation of threats issued by both the kids and their parents. In her panicked phone call to the police on that fatal evening, she describes Owens as trying to break down her door, and yelling “I’m going to kill you!” There is no evidence to suggest that either claim is true.

In the featured CCTV footage of her interrogation (captured from on high, rightfully accusatory), she is asked whether she’s heard the term “stand your ground.” “Yes,” she answers. “Have you ever done any kind of research on that?” “Yes.” She elaborates: “It was mentioned [when] some guy shot someone at a convenience store.” Evidently, Trayvon Martin’s murder radicalized people in both directions.

This admission evoked a chill similar to one I experienced in The Thin Blue Line (1988), when David Harris—revealed to be the real culprit of the murder deconstructed in the film—set forth, in barely hypothetical terms, why he fingered an innocent man. “If you could say why there’s a reason Randall Adams is in jail,” he mused, “it might be because the fact that he didn’t have no place for somebody to stay that helped him that night.” Though Lorincz is neurotic where Harris is nonchalant, she evidences a similar breathtaking lack of insight into the gravity her own actions; the same profound, and ultimately lethal, selfishness.

The Thin Blue Line was famously “snubbed” at the 1989 Oscars, its failure to even be nominated understood as more or less the correlate of Errol Morris’s use of reenactments. If there is today a greater appreciation for the immense stylistic span of nonfiction filmmaking, then The Perfect Neighbor—by and large a work of found footage, and, I’ll note, already regarded as a potential Oscar contender—nevertheless embodies the kind of one-to-one relationship between image and event that has always been the public’s Platonic ideal of the form. It’s a fundamentally illusory one, of course—but the panoptic ubiquity of cameras today masks this truth more effectively than ever before.

The repackaging of police bodycam footage as consumer-ready divertissement evokes the dystopian twilight of the 1990s as conceived in Strange Days (1995): in the world of Kathryn Bigelow’s too-prescient blockbuster flop—since recouped, reputationally at least—punters can plug into a first-person, fully immersive tape of some wedge of someone else’s experience, usually criminal or sexual in nature, recorded straight off their cerebral cortex. It’s a technology that was developed for law enforcement and then quickly co-opted by the black market (in the film, that is; in reality, the bravura sequences that showcase the “playback” experience relied on technology developed expressly for that purpose, over multiple years). Not incidentally, the plot of Strange Days is a riff on the beating of Rodney King: it revolves around the execution of a rising Black music star, accidentally caught on tape. Only by finding this horrifying tape can justice be done; might change be affected.

In Strange Days, some tapes kindle consciousness; others narcotize. The film’s antihero, an unscrupulous playback dealer (and a former cop himself), says he deals only in the latter kind—he will not stoop to “snuff.” Not that it was ever concrete, but a quarter century on from that imagined moment in time, the division between these categories—evidence and entertainment; justice and spectator sport—has crumbled. That much is telegraphed in the “tudum” that prefaces The Perfect Stranger.

And it’s the bodycam footage that distinguishes Gandbhir’s film. The interstitial material—drone shots of the neighborhood; close-ups of Owens’ family members at her funeral service—has a rather generic air. But the story is itself a sadly generic one: Lorincz—“the Karen”—is a garden variety racist, after all. The lesson imparted by The Perfect Neighbor is not so much that a killer has been brought to some kind of justice—Lorincz was convicted of manslaughter and is currently serving out a 25-year prison sentence—but that there are plenty more where she came from. You can find them, no doubt, on YouTube.