The Perfect Neighbor – REVIEW

"She started banging on her door pounding on it, “let me in,” and then... bang!"

Director: Geeta Gandbhir
Synopsis: “Police bodycam footage reveals how a long-running neighborhood dispute turned fatal in this documentary about fear, prejudice and Stand Your Ground laws.”

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I’m self-aware enough to admit my failings as a newer critic, and one of those is that I rarely watch documentaries. It’s not that I don’t like them, but for the most part, I just don’t gravitate towards them. However, The Perfect Neighbor immediately stood out to me back in January when it premiered at Sundance. I didn’t personally know what it was about yet, but all I knew was that this doc was almost entirely made up of footage from police bodycams. There’s seemingly no interviews and no commentary of any sort either; you’re seeing simply what happened, intentionally designed that way to form your own thoughts on this incident. It’s a lot to ask from the audience, mainly because if you don’t know the real incident, we don’t know what happened. Even as I heard names involved, no names were standing out to me. There’s an overall sense of dread throughout here, knowing that something was coming. I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how, and it was horrifying. Honestly, I considered including The Perfect Neighbor as an impromptu entry in my annual Horrorthon run – a post on what I watched for that is gonna be soon – because it was so unsettling. Once we see what happens to Ajike Owens, it does go down the route of what we see Stand Your Ground laws are and how they’re applied in different states, and I really appreciate it not taking a side here. Again, the audience is simply watching all of this unfold. If anything, that’s just where it ends. I would’ve liked a little more meat on the bones personally, maybe an interview at the end, but the emotional charge at the core of The Perfect Neighbor ended up really hitting home how violent people can be when they’re afraid. There’s actually a very powerful phrase I caught that has to do with this movie, and it hits just as hard as the doc itself. When you’re afraid for your life, that doesn’t always mean you’re right in what you do to survive. Seeing this tragedy in such an unfiltered presentation is unsettling in its own right, but it doesn’t make The Perfect Neighbor any less gripping.


Ryan’s Grade: B+