What I found riveting about The Perfect Neighbor was not just how tightly edited the movie is, locomotive-driving to its awful conclusion with detectives questioning Lorincz and TV news clips, but also how sadly predictable the story is in today’s America. The shooter was a white woman who’s nicknamed “Karen” by the local kids, the victim is a Black mom who was busy working as a fast food manager to send her kids to private school, the children were being noisy children. (“I’d rather ya’all kids were in the street playing instead of on the TikTok” as one police officer says—I could hear a nation of moms agreeing silently.) Race is pulsing under the surface of the film’s tensions in this mixed-race neighborhood, and all the pressures bubble over with a grudge and a gun.
My silent pleas notwithstanding, no plate of cookies was going to solve this dispute. Ultimately, the “just the facts ma’am” style of reportage convinced me that this violence is the inevitable conclusion of access to deadly weapons when tempers flare. And as a mom, it made me afraid for the world in which a mother might be killed for sticking up for my children, in their noisy unruly stages to adulthood. It made me wary of the crazies on Next Door and Facebook, who, bots aside, include real people somewhere behind a keyboard.
So do yourself and your family a favor and watch a real drama tonight. In our world, there’s no set scale to measure compassion, but there are stats on likelihood of harm. While serial killer dramas and rich people murderers may attract most of America’s eyeballs, the banality of a fight with your neighbor with a weapon…used against you or your kids…is the very real threat next door.
Watch The Perfect Neighbor now on Netflix.
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