Yesterday, everyone’s favorite surrealist lolo David Lynch turned 74 years old. And as a treat for us criterion kids, he made a short film on Netflix. What about? Oh, nothing unusual—just him interrogating a tormented monkey.
David Lynch’s latest Netflix short “What Did Jack Do” is a bit hard to explain. This short is directed, starred, written by the master surrealist himself. It’s a little bit of everything: we get cerebral, film noir, gumshoe drama, among other categories Netflix listed it as. Here, we’ll try to breakdown the premise for you: A detective (played by Lynch) interrogates a suit-wearing capuchin monkey suspected of murder in a train station where the interrogation takes place on.
It’s 17-minutes of pure, dialogue-driven black and white narrative. The monkey is credited as Jack Cruz who talks with the help of a syncro-vox. As for the narrative, well, it’s really, really hard to explain on the get-go. Polygon eloquently placed it as a film involving “a murder, interspecies love, and a veritable zoo’s worth of animals.” With little to go on, I have to agree with that summation.
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According to The Guardian, this short film was in production since 2014. “I love to build things and this is for a monkey film,” says Lynch. “I’m working with a monkey named Jack and that’ll come out sometime. It is not a chimpanzee, the monkey came up from South America.”
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If your Wednesday is already weird enough, or if you want to fill the void “Twin Peaks: The Return” left—Lynch’s “What Did Jack Do” won’t solve any of those problems. But it will make your day interesting.
“What Did Jack Do” is now available on Netflix Philippines.