Broadly talking, there are two apparent methods to make a documentary in regards to the risks posed — and the injury already finished — by the “stand-your-ground” legal guidelines that Florida has popularized since adopting a model of its personal in 2005.
The primary can be a top-down, macro-political method that examined the pitfalls of making use of the fortress doctrine to a racially stratified nation with extra weapons than folks. It might begin with the truth that murder charges have elevated eight p.c in states the place residents haven’t any responsibility to retreat earlier than utilizing lethal pressure in response to a perceived risk towards their lives, and from there it could isolate a wide range of examples with a view to illustrate that 70 p.c of the folks killed in Florida’s stand-your-ground circumstances have been unarmed. That 79 p.c of their killers may have retreated safely. That white-on-Black homicides are 5 occasions extra more likely to be deemed “justifiable” than the reverse. (Information pulled from the Rockefeller Institute of Authorities.) Such a movie would providing a sobering — if largely analytical — reminder of what its self-selecting viewers already suspected about these legal guidelines.
It might be an understatement to say that Geeta Gandbhir’s “The Excellent Neighbor” takes the different method, simply as it could be an understatement to say the movie takes that method to upsetting extremes. Shot virtually totally by police physique cams and interrogation room CCTVs, Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary crystallizes the horrors of stand-your-ground legal guidelines by inspecting their results by way of the lens of a single case — one which harrowingly illustrates the defects of chateau doctrines (amongst different coverage failures) by portray a microcosmic portrait of white America’s lack of ability to parse between worry and anger.
Stand-your-ground legal guidelines aren’t even talked about by title till the film is greater than half over, as Gandbhir elects to work the difficulty from the within out, with the you-are-there actuality of the footage she makes use of bringing viewers proper into the guts of what’s in the end a human matter. Certainly, a subjective digicam has seldom been extra damning than it’s right here — right here, in an American horror story that doesn’t hinge on whether or not or not Susan Lorincz was really at risk when she fired on the unarmed neighbor knocking at her entrance door, however relatively on whether or not or not Susan Lorincz believed she was at risk when the younger Black mom from throughout the road got here to retrieve her son’s confiscated pill.
In a rustic the place probably the most highly effective group of individuals has been made to really feel completely unsafe, everybody else has good motive to worry for his or her lives. And that worry is just legitimized additional by legal guidelines that permit worry itself to be a reputable excuse for homicide. All people in Lorincz’s quiet Ocala neighborhood knew that she was afraid of the world exterior her door, however they didn’t notice how scared they need to have been in return. Most of them simply considered the 60-year-old physician — a physician of what? — as an area nuisance. The children who performed soccer on the communal patch of grass in entrance of her home referred to as her a “Karen,” to which Lorincz usually responded by calling the cops.
That a lot of the movie’s backstory might be gleaned from police physique cam footage is a testomony to how ceaselessly Lorincz harangued the authorities. She was incensed by the sound of younger folks having enjoyable on languid summer season afternoons, and whereas viewers will understandably brace for the cops to facet with the irritated white girl over the group of high-spirited Black youngsters, it solely takes a number of noise complaints for the police to establish Lorincz as “a psycho.”
Perhaps the authorities would have taken extra aggressive measures if the shoe was on the opposite foot. Perhaps the police would have requested if she owned a weapon after it got here out that she skilled violent panic assaults as the results of her sexual trauma. Perhaps the folks throughout the road would have been extra on-guard if it wasn’t so frequent for the Susan Lorinczs of the world to name little youngsters the n-word only for taking part in too near her truck.
Beaming with outstanding grace, Ajike Owens all however laughs away the cops the primary time we see them ask the mom of 4 in regards to the girl throughout the road. Sure, she threw Lorincz’s “no trespassing” check in her neighbor’s normal course (Lorincz reacts prefer it was an assassination try), however the signal wasn’t even on Lorincz’s property to start with. She knew that Lorincz wasn’t in any actual hazard from her or her youngsters or from anybody else on their avenue, and he or she assumed that — regardless of her neighbor’s racist shrieking — the other was broadly true as properly. However Lorincz didn’t see issues the identical method in her addled thoughts, and on the night time of June 2, 2023, she killed Owens for the crime of knocking on her entrance door.
We see the information of Owens’ loss of life unfold by way of her neighborhood in physique cam footage recorded by the cops who arrived on the scene; the instant fallout from this eminently preventable tragedy is filtered by way of the identical authorized equipment that allowed it to occur within the first place. The digicam is directly each goal and subjective — coldly unblinking however oriented totally round human consideration and motion.
The callous indifference that’s coded into the physique cam aesthetic collides with the intimate proximity of watching an officer inform the daddy of Owens’ youngsters that she’s gone, after which listening (from only a few inches away) as the person relays that message to his newly motherless youngsters. The disparity between what the legislation permits from some and deprives of others has seldom been rendered as devastatingly as it’s right here. “Are you damage?,” a police officer asks one in all Owens’ sons. “No,” he cries, “however my coronary heart is damaged.”
“The Excellent Neighbor” pivots from heartbreak to absurdity — to and the outrage that attends it — because it shifts to concentrate on the aftermath of the homicide, Gandbhir’s perspective widening from physique cams to the surveillance footage captured within the interrogation room on the Ocala police station. It’s chilling to look at Lorincz sit with the horror of what she’s finished; to look at her exaggerate the risk Owens introduced, downplay the vitriol of her personal racism, and grossly misconstrue the timeline of occasions that led as much as the homicide. It’s much more chilling to look at the detectives let her go free later the identical night time, regardless that we perceive that her case has solely simply begun.
To a point, Lorincz’s case is simply too particular to perform as an ideal synecdoche for the 79 p.c of Florida’s stand-your-ground killings during which the assailant may have safely retreated. The scenario had been brewing for months on finish, and Lorincz was clearly affected by a type of PTSD. However therein lies the ability of Gandbhir’s choice to look at stand-your-ground legal guidelines by way of a pinhole: Each crime has its personal mess of extenuating circumstances, but all of them really feel justified within the warmth of the second. To encourage residents to be the gun-toting arbiters of their very own actuality is to weaponize — all too actually — probably the most harmful biases they foster on an on a regular basis foundation. It’s dangerous sufficient that we permit the police to try this, but it surely is likely to be even worse to grant that energy to somebody who likes to consider themselves as the proper neighbor.
Grade: B+
“The Excellent Neighbor” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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