The Devil Next Door

EETA 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 neighborhood, the despairing 911 call, and the cops rushing to the scene of the crime.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

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 neighbors—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 sociop