Netflix has found another hit documentary with their new bodycam focused doc A Perfect Neighbour.
The Perfect Neighbour focuses on the deadly shooting of Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old Black woman who was killed in 2023.
Owens was shot by her neighbour, Susan Lorincz, after she went over to ask about a dispute involving her sons in which Lorincz later admitted to using racial slurs.
The Netflix documentary, which has some harrowing scenes leading to major reactions on social media, sits at a perfect 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Despite this, many will be surprised when they put the documentary on this week to discover it’s not quite the same as traditional docs. A Perfect Neighbour has no talking heads, no voiceover, no recreations of what happened.
The doc is told entirely through bodycam footage, recordings by neighbours, and interview footage from the police and press.
The radical new documentary was created by filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir, who said in an interview with Variety that the film was intended to ‘flip the bodycam footage on its head’.
She pointed to how police bodycam footage is often used to surveil communities and defend the police, often at the expense of communities of colour and vulnerable people.
She also spoke about why the documentary didn’t go the traditional route of a voiceover and talking heads.
Gandbhir said that she did not want to ‘retraumatize’ the Owens family by making the documentary, saying: “We had all the material, so why make them talk about what happened and relive it?
“The body camera footage is undeniable. It’s institutional footage, but there isn’t the bias of us as filmmakers, as journalists, or as reporters on the ground.
“For audiences who so often now question the veracity, authenticity, and perspective, I feel like they cannot deny that this is the series of events that happened.”
This led the documentarian to condense 30 hours of footage accessed by freedom-of-information requests and turn it into a 97-minute doc.
Gandbhir says that the doc is ‘a horror film in many ways’, adding that ‘you have these revelations that make you deeply uncomfortable throughout’.
Many viewers have praised the documentary for its unique perspective on a shooting which raised questions around the Stand Your Ground laws which still apply in almost 30 states in the US.
This allows people to defend themselves using deadly force if they believe it to be necessary and they are legally allowed to be where they are.
Lorincz tried to claim she feared from her life and that was why she shot Owens, something that didn’t hold up in court.
She is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for manslaughter, with a judge saying during her sentence that she was motivated by anger, not fear.
A Perfect Neighbour is available to stream on Netflix now.
Topics: Netflix, True Crime, TV and Film, Film, Documentaries, US News
Michael Slavin