Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!
There are too many stories where people of color who are not a threat or acting in a threatening manner are nonetheless gunned down by the police. What we don’t hear about as much, aside from particularly celebrated cases, is the people who are shot as a result of “stand your ground” laws. By some estimates, 700 or more people are killed using this law every year, and particularly in the cases of white people shooting Black people, they get away with it. The Perfect Neighbor explores one such case.
This doesn’t merely explore the situation in question, though. Rather than interview the children of the woman who was killed, or have a roundtable discussion with the neighbors, The Perfect Neighbor uses bodycam and police interrogation room footage to tell the story. This is literally a story told in the words of the people who experienced it, filtered only by what is included in the edit. There’s nothing cleaned up here—no language or action, no matter how ugly or unsettling.
The case in question concerns Susan Lorincz, who shot and killed Ajike Shantrell on June 2, 2023 in Ocala, Florida, and claimed the Stand Your Ground law as her legal defense. The documentary does not start with the shooting, but with the multiple complaints Lorincz made about her neighbors and her neighborhood. There are a number of bodycam interviews of people in the area, and it is quickly clear that Lorincz is, for lack of a better way of putting it, the neighborhood’s “crazy person.” She frequently complained about noise about nothing more serious than kids playing outside. Eventually, after more yelling and fights, Shantrell told her that any further action against her children would be defended.
On the night in question, Shantrell’s children were once again the subject of Lorincz’s fury, and she went to defend them. Claiming that she feared for her life, Lorincz shot through her metal front door, which was also locked and barred, killing Shantrell.
The Perfect Neighbor does not editorialize, although there would certainly be temptation to do so. Ajike Shantrell was the best friend of director Geeta Gandbhir’s sister-in-law. Gandbhir said this wasn’t an attempt to document true crime but a way to help mitigate and understand the grief over what happened, with at least some of the film’s proceeds going to help support Shantrell’s four kids. Additionally, her use of bodycam footage is intentional—so much of what we see in police shootings comes from bodycam that it is strange, almost jarring, to see it instead used to show the experiences of the people affected by the shooting rather than the shooter.
Any documentary like this is really an exercise in editing more than anything else. It comes down to what we are going to be allowed to see and hear versus what might actually be available. Based on the topic and on what happens, it’s tempting to suggest that Gandbhir is being completely objective, and I want to believe that this is the case. I would like to think that a lot of what was removed is filler: things that aren’t that important to the context of the story being told here. Is that the case? Hard to tell, but given what is on screen, it’s an easy thing to claim.
It is an effective way to tell the story. We get no embellishment here. We see only what the camera does, and we get only what the camera is there to see. It limits our own ability to know the full story, so in a lot of ways, it puts us in the same position that the police are in. We know what they know, we see what they see, and we hear what they hear. Everything else is hearsay and speculation.
What strikes me more than anything is the reaction of Lorincz in the interrogation room being told that she is going to be booked. Her reaction is essentially to say that she’s not going to do that; she’s not going to let them book her. I completely understand her reaction in the moment, and at the same time, I wonder if it where Ajike Shantrell sitting in that chair after shooting Susan Lorincz if the police would have been as patient and nice about her not wanting to get up and be booked for a potential crime.
This is a sobering film. Stand Your Ground laws need to die out.
Why to watch The Perfect Neighbor: These are stories that need to be told.
Why not to watch: Yeah, it’s going to piss you off.
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