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The Perfect Neighbor, out on Netflix on Oct. 17, is a documentary about a white Florida woman who shot and killed her neighbor, a Black mother of four in 2023, pieced together using footage from police body cameras.
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There are no talking heads, just two year’s worth of recordings of police interacting with the shooter, 60-year-old Susan Lorincz—who frequently made complaints about local kids being loud while playing in a vacant lot near her Ocala, Fla., home—as well as body cam footage of interviews with her neighbors. In 2024, Lorincz was found guilty of manslaughter with a firearm and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Here’s how a community dispute escalated into a deadly tragedy.
Lorincz repeatedly called police to report loud neighborhood kids who she said were “trespassing,” constantly screaming at her, telling her to shut up, and threatening to kill her. Lorincz would tell police that she was being attacked, “fearing for her life.” In the film, viewers will see recordings she would take of the kids playing so that she could show them to police. The movie’s title The Perfect Neighbor comes from a comment Lorincz made to the police, “I’m like the perfect neighbor.”
The footage reveals that officers repeatedly responded to Lorincz’s calls with skepticism because she was the only resident with these complaints. The children were not technically playing on Lorincz’s property; they were playing in her next door neighbor’s yard. That neighbor encouraged them to come over and taught the kids how to play football. Lorincz had her landlord put a “no trespassing” sign on her lawn to divide the area between her property and the neighbor’s yard.
Neighbors claimed Lorincz would scream profanities at their children and were disturbed to learn that she was recording them.
The children told the police that they were only playing hide and seek in the lot and that Lorincz would harass them, calling them slurs and swinging an umbrella or a gun at them.
One time, the kids said she even threw roller skates at them, though Lorincz says she was returning a pair of skates left on her lawn. They say Lorincz accused them of trying to steal her truck. “We’re 11!” one of the children is heard saying in the doc. They nicknamed Lorincz a “Karen,” slang for angry middle-aged white women who can be racist in their complaints.
The film centers around an incident on June 2, 2023, when Lorincz claimed that boys were trespassing on her property, and when she told them to go away, they said they were going to get their mom. Lorincz called police, and a dispatcher said officers would be there shortly.
Then Lorincz claims she was inside her home when Ajike Owens, a McDonald’s manager who lived in her neighborhood, showed up and started banging on her door. So she took a gun and shot through the door, not realizing Owens’ son was standing right next to her. “I thought she was going to kill me,” Lorincz told police, repeatedly insisting that it was not a purposeful, premeditated act. When police gave her an opportunity to write an apology letter after being questioned, she took them up on the offer, apologizing to the children and explaining that she “acted out of fear,” afraid their mom was going to kill her.
Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws do permit deadly force if there is a presumption of fear. Homicides involving white shooters and Black victims are more likely to be ruled justifiable than those involving Black shooters and white victims. Most famously, the law led to the 2013 acquittal of a white man named George Zimmerman, who shot unarmed Black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
However, in footage of police questioning Lorincz, detectives say they don’t understand why she took out a gun a mere two minutes after a 911 dispatcher said police were on their way to the scene. As one of them put it, “the decisions you make are not reasonable.” During the 2024 sentencing, the presiding judge argued that Lorincz acted more out of anger than fear.
The doc features snippets of national TV coverage of the case. Lorincz and Rev. Al Sharpton even gave the eulogy at Owens’ funeral, commending her actions and speaking directly to her children: “If she allowed people to degrade you, you’d grow up with a feeling that you were something that could be degraded.”
“If we don’t bear witness to crimes like this, if we turn away, if we don’t shine a light on them, they will continue in the dark,” director Geeta Gandbhir tells TIME.
By scouring two years of police body cam footage, Gandbhir hoped to turn a tool intended to protect police into a tool that exposes their faults.
Gandbhir, whose family was close to Owens, wonders why the police didn’t bring in a social worker or other type of mediator to diffuse the situation.
And she thinks that police should have taken action against Lorincz earlier, based on the weapons in her house and the numerous calls to emergency services for non-emergencies.
“The police don’t have to come in guns blazing and beating people to still have failed the community,” she argues. “If you can pick up a gun to solve a trivial dispute with your neighbor, what else are you capable of?”
Kelly Reichardt, the low-key filmmaker behind pictures like 2019’s First Cow, a study in masculine tenderness set in the 1820s Pacific Northwest, and 2022’s Showing Up, with Michelle Williams as a dedicated artist who’s wholly disinterested in social niceties, has never made a heist film. But there’s a first time for everything: in Reichardt’s subdued, vaguely melancholic sort-of comedy The Mastermind, Josh O’Connor plays a ’70s-era Massachusetts dad and husband, a judge’s son with the elegant tri-note name James Blaine Mooney, who hatches an ambitious plan to steal a quartet of paintings from the (fictional) Framingham Museum of Art, enlisting a couple of local goons to help. The theft takes up only about the first third of the movie. The rest of the time, we bear witness as James flails—and fails—to cover his tracks. This is a study of a privileged kid who’s never had to think about real-world consequences, the sort of character you might normally find it hard to care about. But Reichardt’s script—this one written without her frequent writing partner Jonathan Raymond—gives O’Connor a sturdy frame, and he gets straight to work. The Mastermind is a sneaky, undulating movie; it’s perhaps even less direct than Reichardt’s usual brand of sly, behind-the-beat filmmaking. But O’Connor’s slippery charms hold the picture steady. You never approve of J.B., but you feel something for him even so.
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In the opening scene we see J.B., clad in the kind of worn-in Shetland sweater that whispers old money, wandering through the museum galleries with a sense of studious purpose. His wife Terri (Alana Haim) meanders nearby, experiencing the art in her own way, even as she tunes out the precocious chatter of one of the couple’s two grade-school-age sons. J.B. slips his hand into a glass case and removes a small carved wooden figure; he surreptitiously tucks it into his eyeglass case and drops the whole bundle into his wife’s purse, the kind of thing husbands do all the time when they realize their pockets are too small for all the junk they have to carry. Though we at first don’t know whether Terri’s in on this mini-con, she waltzes out of the museum without a hitch. J.B., on the other hand, stops right in front of the guard at the entrance to tie his shoe. His tiny crime has emboldened him, and the next thing you know, he’s amassing his little crew (they’re played, with varying degrees of bumbling wiliness, by Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, and Javion Allen) to steal four paintings by the American modernist Arthur Dove. At this point, J.B.’s plan seems as cool as anything you’d see in a Steve McQueen movie; Reichardt heightens the intrigue with a jazz-inflected score—by Rob Mazurek, of the Chicago Underground Trio—replete with skittering high-hat work and laid-back, honey-toned trumpets.
J.B. tells his gang that he can’t go along on the actual heist because he’s too familiar a face—he goes to the museum a lot. But the whole thing will be over be in eight minutes; all the guys need to do is enter the museum and drop the paintings into little canvas sacks. (They’ve been whipped up by an unwitting Terri on her home sewing machine.) The whole thing will be simple, he assures them, though for various reasons, it turns out not to be.
Bit by bit we learn more about J.B., though it takes a while before we have any idea why he stole those paintings—and even then, his motives aren’t crystal-clear. He’s an art school dropout and underemployed carpenter who’s living, along with Terri and the kids, under his parents’ roof. (Hope Davis plays his small-town-society mom; Bill Camp is dad, the kind of guy who makes his presence known at home by bloviating at the dinner table.) After the theft, when everyone is out of the house, J.B. removes the paintings from their little sacks and holds one of them up above the family couch, marveling for a moment at the sophisticated effect. That he’s wearing droopy, faded boxers and socks makes the moment both funny and weirdly poignant. What, exactly, is this guy looking for in his life? We’ll never quite know.
But that’s the point, and part of The Mastermind’s sneaky, shaggy-dog power. It turns out that the authorities catch on to J.B. rather quickly. He tries to appease Terri, who’s finally realizing her husband has been up to no good, though you get the idea that he’s always been nearly as opaque to her as he is to us. Now he’s got to get out of town, fast. He heads out to the country, making a stop at the home of his closest friend, Fred (the always-great John Magaro), an old art-school buddy, who chuckles over J.B.’s miserably failed caper. But it seems that Fred’s wife, Maude (Gaby Hoffman), also an old schoolmate, has always had J.B.’s number, and she doesn’t want him hanging around. She and Fred dress him up in a change of clothes—worn corduroy jacket, baggy pants, duffer’s tweed cap—and put him on a bus to nowhere. He looks like a down-and-outer from a 1930s movie, anonymous and ready to ride the rails.
The Mastermind is two things: The first is a portrait of a hoodwinking bumbler who’s gotten by on charm his whole life, at last forced to reckon with his actions. Scene by scene, Reichardt reminds of the world J.B., in his self-absorption, has been hiding out from. Her movie is a vision of crumpled-cigarette-package 1970s Americana, a place where people drink Schlitz from the can, where they’re just trying to get through the day without being too fixated on the war raging on the other side of the world.
In fact, J.B. seems to have ignored the Vietnam War entirely. It’s background noise for him, a thing that buzzes annoyingly on the news. He has no interest in protests—he seems to be barely aware they’re happing. O’Connor is the kind of actor who can play this kind of self-centered puppy-dog haplessness and keep us on his side. His J.B. seems well-bred and thoughtful on the surface, but he actually vibrates with a kind of rumpled toxicity. You shouldn’t marry or have kids with a J.B.—but you also shouldn’t blame yourself for falling for one. As J.B. escapes deeper into the Midwest—he eventually ends up in Ohio—the landscape becomes more distinct while he gradually fades. As shot by Reichardt’s frequent collaborator Christopher Blauvelt, this greater, bigger world has a workaday realness, the opposite of J.B.’s genteel deceptiveness. But then, he’s really just a sad nowhere man, and as the movie’s final shot suggests, soon he’ll be painted right out of the picture, so thoroughly vaporized that you’d never know he’d been there at all. The grandest plan of his life has come to naught. But for a moment we had the pleasure of watching him put it into action, and of believing in it just as much as he did. We fell for the J.B. illusion, until both the magician and the magic disappeared before our eyes.
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Would you buy something from an AI salesperson? Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff doesn’t think so.
It’s a surprising take from a company that has gone all in on AI. It’s even in the company’s branding — the “#1 AI CRM” — and its investments. Earlier this month, Salesforce announced a $15 billion investment in workforce development and startup incubation in San Francisco in an effort to build the “world’s AI capital.”
Even with his bullishness on AI, however, Benioff doesn’t think the tech will replace human salespeople. Salesforce is in fact bringing on thousands of new account executives, he told TBPN, a live daily YouTube show covering business and tech.
Benioff said “face-to-face communication” will always be essential.
“Look, we love AI, OK? But AI — it’s not the same,” Benioff said. “AI doesn’t have a soul. It’s not that human connectivity.”
AI skeptics worry that AI will eliminate jobs or reduce the need for hiring. They often point to Gen Z tech workers, who are seeing fewer available entry-level jobs.
That isn’t the case in Silicon Valley just yet. In fact, AI has led to a hiring boom at many Big Tech companies — including Salesforce.
Benioff said that he recently hired between 3,000 to 5,000 more salespeople.
“I’m growing my sales force,” Benioff said. “I’m going to try to get to 20,000 account executives this year. That doesn’t include systems engineers, managers, the infrastructure teams.”
Salesforce has 80,000 employees, Benioff said, a quarter of whom are trained to help customers use the company’s sales product.
Benioff is one of many CEOs reassuring workers that their company is still hiring, even with AI efficiency gains. Figma CEO Dylan Field recently said that AI wasn’t “coming for you,” and that the company was hiring across departments.
While Benioff is unconcerned about AI replacing sales jobs, he is worried that customers are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation.
He told CNBC host Jim Cramer on Tuesday that the “speed of innovation is far exceeding the speed of customer adoption.”
Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference ended on Thursday. The conference featured talks from several tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol.
Across the street from the conference is the St. Regis Hotel, Benioff said. At the hotel’s bar was another sign that AI wasn’t taking over human-to-human sales anytime soon.
“The bar is filled,” Benioff said. “It’s not our people that are in the bar. It was our customers talking to each other and connecting, going more deeply, having that human touch.”