The Perfect Neighbor

What is the series about?

The Perfect Neighbor is a feature-length Netflix documentary — not a multi-episode series — about the June 2023 killing of Ajike “A.J.” Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, by her white neighbor Susan Louise Lorincz in Ocala, Florida. Directed by Geeta Gandbhir, the film reconstructs a prolonged neighborhood dispute that ended with Lorincz firing a gun through her own locked front door, striking and killing Owens.

The Case

The shooting on June 2, 2023, was the culmination of months of friction between Lorincz and Owens' family, much of it centered on conflicts involving Owens' children. According to the Netflix Tudum production article, the confrontation escalated to the point where Lorincz shot through her closed door, killing Owens, who was unarmed on the other side.

Lorincz was charged with manslaughter rather than second-degree murder, and her defense leaned heavily on Florida's self-defense statutes, including the state's so-called "stand your ground" framework. Prosecutors argued Owens posed no immediate deadly threat at the moment of the shooting. In 2024, a jury rejected the self-defense argument and convicted Lorincz of manslaughter; she was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Available sources do not indicate any subsequent change to her custody status.

Production

Gandbhir builds the film almost entirely from existing primary-source material rather than traditional interviews or reenactments. As detailed in reviews from The A.V. Club and Mark Reviews Movies, the documentary assembles police body-camera footage, 911 call recordings, Lorincz's police interrogation, and courtroom proceedings into a chronological account of the dispute, the shooting, and the trial. This approach lets viewers watch investigators piece together the sequence of events in close to real time, without narration imposing an external interpretive layer.

Reception

Critical response was overwhelmingly positive. Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 99% approval rating with an average score of 8.4/10, and Metacritic listed the film at 83/100, denoting "universal acclaim." The film won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and went on to collect five Critics Choice Documentary Awards, including Best Documentary Feature, Best Director, Best Archival Documentary, Best True Crime Documentary, and Best Editing.

Critics praised the restraint of using raw bodycam and interrogation footage instead of stylized dramatization, arguing it lent the film an unusual immediacy and credibility, as noted in Paste Magazine's review. Audience reactions were largely favorable but emotionally heavy; some viewers found the unfiltered footage difficult to watch and questioned the ethics of presenting a family's real grief as true-crime entertainment, even as most agreed the film handled the material responsibly. No major public dispute involving Netflix, the filmmaker, or the Owens family has been documented beyond this critical debate.

The Case Today

Susan Lorincz remains incarcerated in Florida following her 2024 manslaughter conviction and 25-year sentence. The documentary has renewed national attention on Florida's "stand your ground" law and its application in cases involving racial tension, gun ownership, and neighborhood disputes. As of the film's Netflix release in October 2025, there have been no reported changes to Lorincz's conviction or sentence, and the case continues to be cited in broader discussions about self-defense statutes and their real-world consequences.