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Sundance 2025: The Perfect Neighbor, Sly Lives
The Perfect Neighbor Stagnation (long-term) and change (imminent) hang over this year’s Sundance. In 2027, the festival will relocate to one of three finalist sites—potentially still a Salt Lake City/Park City split, with the balance of power now reversed between the latter and former, through the rumor vine says Cincinnati or Boulder are more likely. (Please, lord, deliver us unto the midwest or thereabouts.) A Variety article headlined “Sundance in Cincinnati? Hollywood Worries Film Festival Won’t Be the Same Without Park City” actually reports nothing of the sort; the voices regretting Sundance’s imminent departure to a less demanding altitude come from two Utah natives (understandable), plus Swiss Army Man producer Lawrence Inglee (“Everything about the experience — the wintery isolation, stomping through the icy streets with the mountains in the distance — is so integrated into what makes it so special”) and Cha Cha Real Smooth producer Erik Feig (“having the one Main Street and walking up and down that hill is a bonding experience”). These are the kind of things you can only say when your life runs smoothly and insulatedly by default; for most people, being inconvenienced is not an enjoyable annual novelty. All others quoted are more clear-eyed, including Sony Pictures Classics co-founder/president Tom Bernard, whose judgment is accurate: “The younger generation, those alternative voices that made Sundance what it is, can’t afford to stay there […] They have priced their audience out of town. And we’re looking at our own budget and making tough decisions about how many people we can send. It’s time to move somewhere more accessible.” It is, admittedly, very funny that this year’s bumper from the Utah Film Commission, after a montage of productions filmed in the state over the years, ends with a shot from Gerry of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon near-death shuffling through the salt flats; is this a deliberate morbid in-joke about the Sundance Utah end of days?
The films themselves have stayed in the same lanes for years, emerging from a limited number of vetted lab/production company pipelines and falling into categories for which no new metadata tags will need to be created. There is a clear gap between how the festival positions itself (a place to discover exciting new voices, the best Amerindie film has to offer) and the actuality; American independent cinema still exists in meaningful form, but the report Sundance gives on it can be stagnant and incomplete. One programming staple (at nearly every other festival too, to be fair) is the well-meaning but underwhelming or actively bad/downright problematic nonfiction advocacy film. Here, a twist: though her production company is ominously named Message Pictures, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor is the first good movie (of two) from the 11 I’ve seen so far. Assembled primarily from bodycam and interrogation room footage, Neighbor tells the two-year-story of tensions between Susan Lorincz, a white woman, and her majority Black neighbors, which led to the former fatally shooting a Black woman in a case so open-and-shut that she was convicted in Florida by an all-white jury. Choosing a case whose merits aren’t up for debate (as opposed to e.g. the pernicious rightwing celebration of Lorincz’s fellow Florida alum George Zimmerman or subway killer Daniel Penny) is one of the first smart moves in this ideologically airtight presentation, which reappropriates footage automatically recorded for entirely different purposes in service of, among other things, an unexpectedly slow-burn neighborhood portrait.
After some scene-setting, Neighbor meaningfully begins in 2022, with one of many calls Lorincz made complaining about neighborhood kids. In this first interaction, Lorincz’s allegations to the responding officers‚one a Black woman, the other a white male—of constant unprovoked aggression coming her way don’t remotely pass any smell test. Then the cops go talk to the neighbors and quickly establish that Lorincz is, at best, a crank forever at odds with everyone on the block (“The Karen called!” one kid shouts). This generously extended sequence establishes a vibe borderline like a hangout film disrupted by one unpleasant person, a suburban Do the Right Thing likewise building inexorably to a very different emotional tone. There are obviously different charges to the cops’ racially inflected interactions, but all things being equal, both acquit themselves well, meaning specifically that kneejerk racisms or police-on-community violence don’t ensue. That bar is low, but the officers grasp the dynamics at play and, in this context, are essentially acting as underqualified social workers. The bodycam’s primary function—generating evidence in the event of a violent police-civilian interaction—is subverted; law enforcement isn’t there when the shooting finally happens, their footage instead pressed into service for a neighborhood portrait.
When tragedy occurs, that initially laudable-seeming approach to community policing reveals the structural flaws conditioning all these encounters. Lorincz repeatedly made nuisance complaints about imaginary aggressions; why was she humored? (This is not an actual question.) When Lorincz is held for custody after the shooting but not charged with a crime, protests erupt: why the holdup for investigative thoroughness that surely wouldn’t attend a Black suspect in a similar situation? (This is also not an actual question.) Gentleness of touch or “respect for due process” are theoretically good things, but who they serve most becomes quickly evident. It takes the duration of all those interactions to fully register how systemic factors played out in this specific instance, a stand-in for the increased homicides attributable to Stand Your Ground laws nationwide. That Lorincz was actually convicted is good; that it’s hard to imagine that automatically happening speaks for itself.
Gandbhir and (native Floridian) editor Viridiana Lieberman take full advantage of the two-person patrols’ POVs for shot/reverse shot purposes, finding unexpected moments in and out of scenes, and some cinema studies theoretician will have a field day with the way the “embodied camera,” with a slightly fisheye wide angle not like any regularly used in movies proper, is rethought here. These visual fascinations are not the film’s primary purpose, but I’ll take new images wherever I can find them, including exceptionally grim contexts. It’s regrettable, though survivable, that early stretches of the film, as well as the shooting, are tonally underlined by Laura Heinzinger’s unnecessary ominous score, and it’s a little cheap to include voiceover flash-forwards to witness testimony after-the-fact, as if promising impatient true crime viewers that yes, a homicide is on the way. These minor missteps point to an entirely different kind of quick-hit product, a path much more commonly taken, but thankfully not here.
Another programming staple is the big-name musician documentary, often on opening night so that a fun unannounced bonus concert can take place right after. With Summer of Soul and now Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presumably has that slot on lock as long as he wants it (an Earth, Wind & Fire doc is up next). Summer of Soul was primarily a showcase for copyright-cleared, fully excavated live footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Footage, all very enjoyable when the film didn’t cut back to talking heads testifying rotely to the importance and emotional impact of what we’re seeing; Sly Lives! has even less music and more talking heads. Its best parts are, unsurprisingly, its most unrepentantly music geek moments—Thompson is a deeply knowledgeable crate-digger, a walking Discogs encyclopedia very capable of getting into the technical weeds. One of my favorite music doc staples is when a well-known song is taken back to the mixing board and stripped down to one or two tracks at a time, casting each individual part into revelatory relief, and an early highlight here is when that approach is taken to “Dance to the Music”—an especially fun track to break down given its famous innovation of highlighting one musician at a time before bringing them all together. Later, Thompson takes advantage of having negotiated access to Stone’s completing recording sessions to audio-montage the making of “Everyday People” across 100+ takes as its tempo accelerates and its key moves down, providing a genuinely insightful vantage on previously locked-up materials.
I would have cheerfully watched two hours of similar nerding out, but that is not how this goes; instead, we get an opening montage salvos letting us know that Stone was an innovator, a genius and so on, followed by a pretty standard march through his career. The talking heads are equally stock when it comes to providing historical context—we learn that the ’60s were “intense” (no doubt!) over footage of race riots, etc.. In the absence of new information, Thompson’s larger structuring gambit is to ask all his interviewees whether they think they can define “Black Genius” (everyone passes) and, if so, whether there are extra pressures upon it. The answer to the latter, unsurprisingly, is yes all round, for the usual reasons, which isn’t terribly illuminating, even if it’s fun to watch D’Angelo give a definitive “yes” while working through a pack of Newports. While the choice to make this more “audience-friendly” (i.e., general interest) has an obvious commercial logic, it’s very odd that Stone is not at any point directly interviewed or seen. The film certainly doesn’t gloss over his decades of drug arrests, which would be an impossibility, but nonetheless remains comparatively discreet and less detailed than its subject’s wiki. While that might be seen as a form of protective caretaking for an immensely important but frail musician, the little-known fact is that during the pandemic Stone was forced to get clean due to a lack of supply, after which he promptly wrote a memoir with an intro from Questlove himself. If Stone is nonetheless either not in the shape to be on-camera or otherwise unwilling to be, it’s very odd to gloss over his self-rehab in a single voiceover sentence and not mention any of this explicitly, instead confining itself to the final triumphant underlining of the film’s own title as proof of current life rather than a statement of perpetual artistic influence.
