Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor can well be called by another title: The Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The remarkable documentary begins on a note of urgency with the news of a woman shot dead in a Florida neighbourhood, the despairing 911 call, and the cops rushing to the scene of the crime.
It then goes back in time to probe into what led to the cold-blooded murder. Gandbhir does so ingenuously by rigorously sifting through two years of police bodycam footage and interviews of the various people involved—Karen, the perpetrator of the crime, Ajike Owens, the dead woman, her family and children and the neighbours—and then meticulously piecing it all together into a narrative that is at once riveting, compelling and thought provoking.
The roots lie in what appears to be an innocuous quarrel between the antagonistic, cantankerous lady who has problems with the children and their games. A reason why she is, in turn, actively disliked for her sociopathic ways.
However, you see things steadily get out of control over the following two-year period and in the light of what eventually comes to play, there is the frustration of knowing that, perhaps, it all could have been prevented by taking things seriously right at the start and through timely action. Why was the social sickness and malignancy left to fester? The perennial conflicts and fights that the lady gets into and her constant complaints to the police feel like ticking bombs in hindsight.
Her irritating ways grow steadily sinister over time, revealing intolerance and racism at its ugliest in not just the verbal abuse she subjects her multicultural neighbourhood to but sudden violent actions like ramming her truck into someone’s gate.
The harping on her right to peace and solitude borders on misanthropy, and her anger issues combined with the easy access to gun is indeed a recipe for disaster.
The film questions all of this and more—the social and community fabric and, most so, the American legal system and its idea of justice. Why did it take so long to put Karen behind bars? And that eternal question—why are the gun laws so lax?
Winner of the Directing Award in the US Documentary at the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival, The Perfect Neighbor is a reminder of how dangerous America can be, how cheap human lives can get and how easily they can be snuffed out. A horrifying real-life crime story that leaves one with a mix of feelings—of anger, fear and sadness stemming from senselessness.
Cinema Without Borders
In this weekly column, the writer explores the non-Indian films that are making the right noises across the globe. This week, we talk about Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor