In this two-hander, the director plays a cop interrogating a capuchin monkey accused of murder – which is as funny and absurd as it sounds
Dropping short films without warning is the new rock’n’roll for A-list directors right now: Paul Thomas Anderson did it with the dance piece Anima and Jonathan Glazer did it with his nightmarish The Fall. Now it is the turn of no less a figure than David Lynch, who has released a characteristically strange and funny 17-minute two-hander entitled What Did Jack Do? on
Netflix, created under the production auspices of the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris. (Perhaps it will be on permanent view there after it leaves Netflix.)
It is in black-and-white, with cod-scratches on the print, the result being something not merely ancient but unearthly looking, as if recovered from some cinemathèque archive on a distant planet. It looks very much like Lynch’s famed debut Eraserhead, but with an eerie cop-procedural grammar, and an emphasis on coffee that might put you in mind of Twin Peaks.