Unrecorded Night would have been one final entry into the David Lynch LA mystery noir canon that characterised a key era of the beloved filmmaker’s career.
When the world lost David Lynch at the beginning of 2025, it was a bitter blow. Lynch was a truly original American filmmaker and beyond the sense of loss at his departure, there was a keen edge to the sadness, sharpened by the fact that such an admired artist hadn’t released a feature film for the last two decades of his life.
Despite suffering from severe health complications near the end of his life, Lynch was always an incredible creative force, and so it was unsurprising to hear that even when suffering with emphysema, he was still working on another ambitious project, with Naomi Watts and Laura Dern set to star. Watts has previously talked about meeting Lynch to discuss the project, stating, “He was not, in any way, done. I could see the creative spirit alive in him.”
Netflix CEO Ted Sandaros later revealed that the streaming platform had agreed to be the home for Lynch’s next project, and a few details have new been revealed about Unrecorded Night. It was another noir mystery that would have joined the filmmaker’s triptych of films – Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Lost Highway – sometimes referred to as Lynch’s LA trilogy.
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Cinematographer Peter Deming, who collaborated with Lynch on Twin Peaks: The Return was due to work on Unrecorded Night, and has chatted to The Film Stage about the project, saying: “Shortly before he passed – well, like a year, because it was pre-Covid – there was Unrecorded Night, which he had written. I’d read it, and we actually went on one scout, looking at locations. Then Covid hit, so everything shut down and it never rekindled.”
Deming would open up a little about the project, adding: “It’s definitely its own original thing… It was going to be a lot of episodes, because David really liked what he called ‘the continuing story.’…[When we made] Twin Peaks: The Return, we weren’t really sure how many episodes there were going to be until it got into post-production, because it wasn’t really written that way; it was written as a 550-page film. So how that was sliced and diced really was a post-production question. Unrecorded Night was the same way. It took me three sittings to read it because it was so thick, but it was definitely not Twin Peaks. It was definitely a really interesting… mystery, I would say.”
It certainly sounds like a project in the style of Lynch, whose death has left an unfillable hole in the American cinematic landscape. Lynch was never one for revealing the answers buried deep within his art. What Unrecorded Night could have been must now be added to that long list of unsolved mysteries.
