Last night after I finished a few rounds of on-line Call of Duty: WWII I surfed my streaming services looking for something to watch before heading off to bed. What I found was What Did Jack Do? an odd two-character black-and-white short film, just 17 minutes, about a detective interrogating a witness at a train station. Aside from a waitress that brings coffee during the interrogation the entire film is unnamed Detective and the suspect Jack having a non sequiturfilled absurdist conversation.

Written, starring, and directed by David Lynch it’s normal to expect the absurd and strange but I was not fully prepared for this little gem. You see, Jack is a capuchin, a South American monkey. Utilizing n ungraded effect similar to what was used in the cartoon Clutch Cargo of superimposing a person’s speaking mouth on a pre-photographed image, Jack rebels, denies, and dodges the detective dogged digging into a murder.

What Did Jack Do? carries a copyright from 2016 and was shown at festivals but only last month did Lynch allow it to be added to Netflix’s service. I must admit that with suggestions of barnyard deviancy and murder this film worked for me more than some of Lynch’s feature films. It was oddly compelling, tense, and downright funny and certainly worth it’s brief running time.