True cinema is John Lithgow terrorizing Geoffrey Rush in a nursing home with his creepy hand puppet.
On the basis of its premise alone, The Rule of Jenny Pen is a must-see thriller. Fortunately, New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s film (in theaters March 7) also knows how to execute its utterly bonkers conceit, enhancing its deranged insanity with formal vigor and a stinging strain of melancholy, not to mention excellently unhinged performances from its illustrious leads.
Playing like a modern-day Edgar Allan Poe tale as helmed by Stuart Gordon, it’s an old-age nightmare that delivers the gonzo genre goods.
Stefan Mortensen (Rush) is a judge with a foul condescending streak, as he makes clear when he interrupts sentencing a man for sexual assault of minors by chastising the victims’ mother for her negligence. Before he can finish that tirade, he collapses courtesy of a stroke that lands him in Royal Pine Mews Care Home, where he’s confined to a wheelchair and stuck in a room shared by former rugby star Tony Garfield (George Henare).
Stefan is unhappy about every aspect of his situation and convinced that he’s not long for this facility; once he regains full use of his legs, he believes, he’ll be back home and, presumably, on the bench. Yet this is wishful thinking, considering that he suffers intermittent mental “blips” that cause him to lose stretches of time and awaken in unfamiliar environs.
With a look of smug superiority on his face and a bulbous right cheek that appears to be the byproduct of his deteriorating condition, Rush embodies Stefan as the world’s biggest holier-than-thou prick, flaunting his intelligence by quoting A Farewell to Arms, patronizingly defining the big words he spouts, and dismissively telling Tony that, yes, he knows what Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears is about because “all those books are about the same thing.”
He’s an arrogant grump whose malaise has only further soured his demeanor, and he’s none too pleased to be in Royal Pine Mews, which is populated by the infirm and out-to-lunch, be it a woman who chatters on about the family that’s going to pick her up after Christmas (even though, as Stefan informs her, it’s early October), or a smoker who, when Stefan’s back is turned, accidentally lights himself on fire—thereby proving the notion, shared by everyone in this place, that the resident cat’s presence is a harbinger of death.
More menacing than that ubiquitous feline, however, is Dave Crealy (Lithgow), who stalks the hallways and recreational rooms in pajamas and an open robe, his hair a wild mess and his scraggly beard failing to soften his maniacal, yellow-toothed grin.
Most notable about Dave is his companion Jenny Pen, a bald puppet in a featureless gown that’s constantly on his hand. Sometimes Jenny Pen has a blank countenance; on other occasions, she’s smiling or frowning. What’s consistent are her hollow, glowing eyes and Dave’s infatuation with her. With Jenny’s fingers often caressing Dave’s mouth, and Dave’s own eyes alight with madness and cruelty, they make for a strikingly disturbed pair, looking like the image one might find accompanying the dictionary’s definition of “demented.”
Dave doesn’t speak much in public but he reigns supreme in this enclave, tormenting his fellow residents in the dead of night. At first, Stefan is too miserable to pay him much mind; upon being left momentarily alone in a bathtub, the judge attempts to commit suicide. Nonetheless, he soon gets a taste of the madman’s bitter medicine when he awakens to find Dave dousing his crotch with urine.
The staff, led by Madeline (Holly Shanahan), don’t believe Stefan’s accusations that he’s a victim rather than an incontinent geezer. Stefan subsequently gets a genuine demonstration of Dave’s craziness when the latter visits Tony and forces him to admit, with the doll pressed up against his face, that Jenny Pen “rules.” Following this submissive admission, Dave demands that Tony lick Jenny Penn’s asshole—i.e., Dave’s wrist—and while Stefan isn’t cowed by this exhibition, it does reveal the extent of Dave’s lunacy.
Adapted by Ashcroft and Eli Kent from Owen Marshall’s short story, The Rule of Jenny Pen is awash in red lighting, inky shadows, and silhouettes that dance and flicker across walls and curtains.
The director employs cockeyed angles, distorted close-ups, creeping pans, and rotating camerawork to create a hallucinatory, phantasmagoric atmosphere. The mood is malevolent and irrational, as well as quite sad, complete with snapshots of the elderly muttering to themselves, forlornly staring off into the distance, dribbling food as they’re fed, and being unceremoniously bathed in austere showers.
It’s a bleak vision of the final years of life, especially in a facility such as this, and the film shrewdly tethers its Jenny Pen-centric wickedness to the horrors of growing old, in the process transforming Stefan and Tony’s battle against Dave into a fight for not simply their lives but their—and their fellow tenants’—dignity.
Lithgow’s turn is a thing of delirious beauty, whether he’s grimacing at Stefan from across a crowded room (as Jenny Pen tauntingly waves its little hands at him) or dancing amidst his fellow senior citizens, his arms raised overhead and his shoes stomping on others’ feet.
Bitter, nasty, and drunk with power, he’s an abuser with the creepiest sidekick in recent memory, and Ashcroft seizes every opportunity to highlight the puppet’s unnerving visage and to cast it as a supernatural specter possessing its owner. With Rush as his ideally frustrated and fed-up foil, Lithgow gleefully chews the scenery, even as he maintains just enough humanity in Dave to prevent him from resonating as just a carnivalesque monster.
Recalling everything from Puppet Master and Dolls to 1978’s stellar Anthony Hopkins-headlined Magic, The Rule of Jenny Pen ultimately devolves into a stew of murder and vengeance, with Stefan compelled by circumstance to drop his guard, squash his ego, and strike up a partnership in order to survive.
Lest that make it sound like a heartening parable, Ashcroft’s film ends with an unsentimental act of violence. Regardless, its closing moments also suggest that death isn’t something to be feared, so long as one still has (or has regained) their self-respect.
