Following the announcement earlier today that Studio Ghibli films will be coming to Netflix on giving February 1, the platform have also made a previously unseen short film by David Lynch available to stream.
Released to celebrate the director’s 74th birthday, What Did Jack Do? available to stream is an experimental crime film shot entirely in black-and-white. In it, according to its description on Netflix, “a detective interrogates a monkey who is suspected of murder” (yes, the monkey talks). The 17-minute exchange between the monkey, Jack, and the detective (played by Lynch) takes place at an apartment near a train station and is every bit as bizarre, eerie, and oddly funny as you’d expect from a Lynch short film.
What Did Jack Do? is not a completely new short film. It was, in fact, filmed in 2016, and later screened at Lynch’s Festival of Disruption in New York in 2018. Yet it has never been available online, and therefore is essentially a Netflix original.
The film was written, directed, and edited by Lynch himself. The monkey is credited as ‘Jack Cruz’, who appears as ‘himself’.
Watch the film on Netflix.