Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor can well be called by another title: The Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The remarkable documentary begins on a note of urgency with the news of a woman shot dead in a Florida neighborhood, the despairing 911 call and the cops rushing to the scene of crime.
It then goes back in time to probe into what led to the cold-blooded murder. Gandbhir does so ingenuously, by rigorously sifting through two years of police body cam footage and interviews of the various people involved—Susan Lorincz, called The Karen by her neighbourhood kids, the perpetrator of the crime, Ajike Owens, the dead woman, her family and children and the neighbours—and then meticulously piecing it all together into a narrative that is at once riveting, compelling and thought provoking. All this despite the fact that the entire film has no fresh footage but only that which has been sourced from the police archives.
The roots lie in what appears to be an innocuous quarrel between the antagonistic, cantankerous lady who has problems with the children and their games. A reason why she is, in turn, actively disliked for her sociopathic ways. Talk of the irony of the film’s title, for them she is as imperfect a neighbour as can possibly be.
However, you see things steadily get out of control over the following two-year period and, in the light of what eventually comes to play, there is the frustration of knowing that, perhaps, it could all have been prevented by taking things seriously right at the start and through timely action. Why was the social sickness and malignancy left to fester?
The perennial conflicts and fights that the lady gets into and her constant complaints to the police feel like ticking bombs in hindsight. Her irritating ways grow steadily sinister over time revealing intolerance and racism at its ugliest in not just the verbal abuse she subjects her multicultural neighbourhood to (the use of the N-word for instance) but sudden violent actions like ramming her truck into someone’s gate.
The harping on her right to peace and solitude borders on misanthropy and her anger issues combined with the easy access to guns is indeed a recipe for disaster. The film questions all of this and more—the social and community fabric and most so the American legal system and idea of justice. Why did it take so long to put The Karen behind bars? Would it have been the same if a person of colour had committed the crime? How can self defense as in “stand your ground’ laws exonerate a mindless killing? And that eternal question—why are the gun laws so lax?
Winner of the Directing Award in the US Documentary section at the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival, The Perfect Neighbor is a reminder of how dangerous America can be, how cheap human lives can get and how easily they can be snuffed out. A horrifying real life crime story that is very American but that can leave anyone anywhere in the world with a similar mix of feelings—of anger, fear and sadness stemming from a senseless and entirely avoidable act of violence.