The Ring Doorbell Reckoning: Inside the Netflix Documentary Exposing America’s Racism and Fear
In the age of Ring doorbells and Nextdoor hysteria, director Geeta Gandbhir’s searing documentary “The Perfect Neighbor” arrives on Netflix like a gut punch wrapped in police body-cam footage. This isn’t entertainment—it’s an unflinching autopsy of how surveillance culture, systemic racism, and post-pandemic paranoia converged to create a perfect storm that cost 35-year-old Ajike Owens her life.
The facts are devastating in their simplicity: In 2023, Owens, a Black Florida mother, was fatally shot by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, then 58. Following Lorincz’s arrest, investigators discovered she had meticulously researched Florida’s notorious “stand your ground” statute—that legislative hall pass allowing residents to deploy deadly force when they claim to feel threatened on their own property. The implication hangs in the air like smoke: this wasn’t spontaneous violence. This was premeditated fear dressed up as self-defense.
What makes Gandbhir’s documentary so viscerally compelling—and deeply uncomfortable—is how it chronicles the escalation we’re powerless to stop. We know Owens’s fate from frame one, yet we’re forced to watch the slow-motion catastrophe unfold through the very surveillance apparatus that was supposed to protect us. Police body cameras, home security systems, news footage, interrogation room recordings—the technological panopticon captures everything except justice itself.
Lorincz emerges as a figure of such concentrated malevolence that one officer, departing yet another manufactured emergency, mutters the word that cuts through professional courtesy: “Psycho.” The documentary draws uncomfortable parallels to “Dear Zachary” in its portrait of gendered rage and calculated manipulation. Yet Lorincz represents something larger and more insidious than individual pathology—she’s the logical endpoint of America’s post-COVID psychological unraveling.
She’s every paranoid poster flooding neighborhood Facebook groups with Ring-camera footage of “suspicious” Girl Scouts. She’s the hysteria behind accusations that a neighbor’s sunflowers are surveillance devices. She’s the trembling hand reaching for a firearm because a teenager dared use her driveway to turn around. Statistically speaking, many of these digital vigilantes are armed.
The documentary’s most poignant observation comes from pediatrics professors Hillary L. Burdette and Robert C. Whitaker, who note that children’s play “requires solving some form of a social problem”—negotiating rules, boundaries, inclusion. This cultivates empathy, flexibility, emotional intelligence. But for the children in “The Perfect Neighbor,” the unsolvable problem was Susan Lorincz herself. And in twenty-first-century America’s surveillance state, she is everywhere.
Perhaps most haunting is the testimony from Lorincz’s sister during sentencing, revealing severe childhood abuse—suggesting this tragedy wasn’t just racism or mental illness, but a toxic cocktail of envy and dispossession. One police officer, interviewing neighborhood children, asks a woman which child is hers. Her response, half-joking but wholly sincere, crystallizes everything Lorincz destroyed: “They’re all mine.” That’s what community looks like. That’s what fear kills.
