"Yet its latest hit, The Perfect Neighbor, takes a different tack. Unlike the average true-crime doc, the film doesn't rely on soapy reenactments and first-person accounts to piece together its story: a Black woman's murder by her white neighbor in 2023, which rocked a tight-knit Florida community. Instead, it leans on primary-source material culled from body cameras and interrogation rooms."
"The sketch was a trailer for an imagined forthcoming Netflix true-crime docuseries called Gone Without a Trace, which would track three men rattled by their wives' sudden disappearance. This week's host, Miles Teller, and the cast members Ben Marshall and Kenan Thompson played the bereaved husbands; they retold their version of events through a combination of sit-down interviews and security-camera recordings."
"Via a series of "never-before-seen interviews" with the men's partners-played by Veronika Slowikowska, Ashley Padilla, and Sarah Sherman-we soon learned that these spouses hadn't been abducted at all. Instead, two of the women were traveling. ("I had told Doug about it maybe 45 times," Slowikowska's exasperated character said.) Sherman's character had the most absurd story of the bunch: She happened to just be in the bathroom for a while."
Netflix's true-crime documentaries often carry a polished, recognizable sheen, but The Perfect Neighbor adopts a grittier approach. The film reconstructs a 2023 killing of a Black woman by her white neighbor in a tight-knit Florida community using body-camera and interrogation-room footage instead of reenactments and first-person memoir-style accounts. That unvarnished sourcing distinguishes the film amid flashier true-crime titles. Saturday Night Live parodied that real-time-footage style with a faux trailer called Gone Without a Trace, in which three husbands unravel over apparently vanished wives who have actually been traveling or are simply in the bathroom.
Read at The Atlantic
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