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Every neighborhood seems to have that one neighbor—the one the kids try their best to avoid, whose house they always skip on Halloween, who’s never asked to buy flowers for the school fundraiser. And the Netflix documentary The Perfect Neighbor introduces that neighbor in one Florida community—and a conflict that turned tragic.
The Perfect Neighbor tells the story of an ongoing neighborhood dispute that spiraled out of control. Susan Lorincz was seemingly well-known to the Marion County police department, often calling to complain about the children in her neighborhood, who played football in an open lot next to her home. But one summer night, when one of the mothers came to her door to confront her about her behavior toward the children, Susan shot through the door—and the incident led to a court case that tested the state’s Stand Your Ground laws.
Shown mostly through body cam footage from local police officers who were called to the neighborhood time after time over more than a year leading up to the shooting, The Perfect Neighbor tells a dark and haunting true story. The suspense slowly builds as one team of officers after another knocks on Susan’s door to listen to her latest complaints about noisy kids and neighbors trespassing while out walking their dog. She makes increasingly wild accusations, while the kids call her “The Karen” and their moms tell the police, “That lady yells at everybody’s kids.” As the calls continue and the threats escalate, though, it becomes clear that this isn’t just another harmless lady yelling at the kids to get off her lawn—and it just gets stranger and more unbelievable.
Since most of the footage comes from police body cams and not from traditional movie cameras, it tends to be shaky and disorienting. Especially when the story is playing out at night, it can be dark and blurry and hard to follow the action. But that also reminds viewers of the horrifying reality of the situation—making it the kind of terrible train wreck of a true story that will grab audiences from the start and hold their attention until the end.
The Perfect Neighbor isn’t a dry, just-the-facts kind of documentary. The footage is compiled in a way that tells a tense and captivating story in the same way that any good narrative feature would—without need for the usual interviews or narration. It can be a difficult film to watch, but it’s definitely a captivating one.
You can follow this stranger-than-fiction story when The Perfect Neighbor arrives in select theaters on October 10, 2025 before premiering on Netflix on October 17.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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