Netflix’s New 100% Critic Scored Movie Surges To Peak Popularity

It is widely thought that a successful streaming platform is built on movies and shows featuring blockbuster brands and A List actors. In fact, not only can non-fiction documentaries have just as much impact but they can generate even more exposure of the events they are based on than when they actually took place.

One of the starkest examples of this is the new Netflix documentary film The Perfect Neighbor which uses police bodycam footage to piece together the events surrounding the June 2023 killing of Ajike Owens by her neighbor Susan Lorincz.

It followed an altercation between Lorincz and Owens’ children in a field near their homes in Ocala, Florida. This caused Owens to go to Lorincz’s locked front door where she was shot through it while waiting outside. In November last year Lorincz was sentenced to 25 years in prison with the judge citing the “indiscriminate nature” of her actions and the trauma inflicted on Owens’ children.

The incident attracted international media coverage as it touched on emotive issues such as gun ownership, mental health, neighbors taking the law into their own hands and the stand-your-ground law which entitles individuals to use deadly force to defend themselves against perceived threats.

The movie had an inside track as the director Geeta Gandbhir’s sister-in-law was Owens’ best friend. Concerned that Lorincz would use the stand-your-ground law, Gandbhir’s partner and fellow producer Nikon Kwantu began documenting and filming the case in Florida ahead of the trial. It paid off.

The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year where it won the Directing Award. In turn, that put it on Netflix’s radar and, according to Variety, it offered $5 million for the distribution rights. It then had a limited theatrical release in the United States on October 10 before landing on Netflix a week later.

It currently stands in second place in the Netflix list of top ten English-language movies as it has been viewed 16.7 million times for a total of 27.5 million hours. That’s just the start.

The film has an average 100% critics score across 67 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes with audiences being less generous with a 77% score. “It’s an outstanding, provocative film that is bound to inspire debate. Watch it and discuss,” wrote The Times of London in its review while the New York Times added that “the Perfect Neighbor deserves to be broadly seen, discussed and heeded.” Saying that it has captured the zeitgeist is an understatement.

Remarkably, the show has generated five times more interest in the events than when the shooting and the trial took place.

This is shown in data from Google which processed more than five trillion searches last year giving it a 90% share of the market. Its Google Trends service analyzes the popularity of top queries though the results don’t reveal the number of searches for a specific term. Instead, they show the volume of search inquiries over time with 0 being the lowest point and 100 being the maximum relative interest rather than the absolute number of searches.

The results are presented on graphs with each point relative to the others so a score of 50 means that there were half as many searches for a term on that date than there were when it hit 100. That represents peak popularity for the term whereas a score of zero refers to the lowest number of search enquiries during the given time.

The graph above shows that searches for Susan Lorincz in the United States hit a level of 17 in June 2023 but hit 100 last week just days after the debut of the movie. Searches for Ajike Owens were a little higher in June 2023 when they reached 32 at the time of the incident but again peaked at 100 last week.

It shows the continued cultural power of broadcast media and it can stretch far beyond a show or a movie. Last year British broadcaster ITV debuted Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office which starred Marvel actor Toby Jones and told the story of the wrongful convictions of hundreds of workers at Britain’s Post Office. Even though the issue had been reported since 2009, the convictions were only quashed following the broadcast of the show.

In turn Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office won a BAFTA and the creative team went on to make The Hack which is currently playing on ITV and is about the phone hacking scandal which engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper. Time will tell whether The Perfect Neighbor too goes on to bring about material change but it has already cast a bright spotlight on the events and, for Gandbhir, that may well be enough.

Additional reporting by Christian Sylt