Very few people, particularly the elderly, enjoy going to old folks’ homes. The Rule of Jenny Pen, a harrowing and darkly humorous horror thriller, turns the placidly soothing facade of this end of life institution into a maze as bleak, sinister, and choked with forgotten memories as the Overlook Hotel. It makes sense, then, that Stephen King would declare this gripping film, directed by New Zealander James Ashcroft (Coming Home in the Dark), one of his favorites of the year. Jenny Pen is a cold-eyed excavation of one of the basest fears humanity possesses: That life, in all its triumphs and vicissitudes, is a meaningless house of cards, a painstaking parlor trick that death will invariably, carelessly topple. That we all die alone, forgetful and forgotten.
Judgement Day
By all accounts, Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush) had lived a good life. A dignified and imperious judge who seems to specialize in sex crimes, his word was gospel in his courtroom and his decisions were steadfastly moral. When the film opens, he is angrily sentencing a pedophile to eighteen years in prison–– and struggling to get the words out. After condemning both the molester and the victims’ mother as fundamentally “culpable,” he collapses in a heap. When he awakens, he’s in a wheelchair. A seizure has halted his life in its tracks, though he insists it’s only temporary… as does an ailing dementia patient who twitters at him on a heartbreaking loop about how her family is coming to get her soon (“you’ve been here for years,” another patient quips).
The story feels like a retelling of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? from a man’s perspective. Stefan, accustomed to respect and a certain erudite class status, refuses to seek solidarity with the people around him who he staunchly views as lesser-than, clearly in part as a means of avoiding the fact that he’s been callously catapulted into the next–– and final–– stage of his life by the mundane passage of time. Though he’s initially able to cajole his roommate, a former rugby star named Tony (veteran Maori actor George Henare) into submission, another patient vexes him: Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), a largely mute but menacing presence who wears a sinister babydoll puppet with holes for eyes on one hand, ostensibly to help him communicate through the fog of dementia.
Though no one will believe him, Stefan knows Dave does not have dementia at all. Rather, he and his puppet Jenny Pen (so named for the eerie old folk song about cutting off people’s legs if they won’t dance) terrorize the home after dark with impunity, wearing the ravages of aging like a Halloween mask to make his sadistic domination seem improbable. It’s a battle of wits, skill, and endurance whose scales threaten to shift constantly as each day adds weight to the burden of illness Stefan bears. “Will anyone testify on my behalf?” the judge roars, suddenly helpless for the first time. The silence is deafening. No longer the arbiter of justice, Stefan is forced to contend with the reality that everyone is in some way culpable to others.
Who Rules?
Lithgow steals the show as Dave, inhabiting his physicality with a mastery that makes each shift from shrunken, dead-eyed lethargy to vivacious, even spritely violence feel almost demonic. Indeed, his character is the sort of ghostly angel of death that would feel right at home in The Shining (a reference Ashcroft makes with precision). Stalking wan corridors in a bathrobe at night, he’s trailed by a cat whose affection signals the imminent demise of the residents. Seen from this angle, it’s easy to picture how the photos pasted on each resident’s door would look on their gravestones. But Rush and Henare’s performances are equally integral to the delicate tonal balance the film strikes. Under Rush’s bluster hides a barely concealed sense of primal dread of which the character himself only slowly becomes aware. His subjectivity steers the narrative (allowing for several crisp moments of welcome surrealism), and the anguish and vulnerability at his own loss of control that Rush brings to the role is enough to make you call your grandparents. Henare, meanwhile, is the most tragic figure of all. Cheerful and magnanimous, Tony is a fundamentally good character. His suffering feels less cosmic, more senseless than Stefan’s which feels like something out of a particularly karmic Twilight Zone episode. His very presence in the facility speaks to the more mundane tragedies of aging: Though he’s in contact with his family and community and is of sound mind (only his hip seems to pain him), no matter how famous he was in life, Jenny Pen airs the fear that it’s all the same in the end.
The film is openly twisted, tackling the subject of elder abuse so directly it feels like breaking a half-forgotten taboo. Petty tortures and bureaucratic mishaps mingle with more serious kinds of danger in a whirling dervish set to golden oldies and the sounds of a hospital in miniature. The indignities these characters face are fundamentally humanizing, part of Ashcroft’s basic project. Roving through the nursing home, Stefan passes catatonic old men with orange mush dribbling down their faces and women who plaster themselves to the windows like geckos on the side of a tank. But when Dave happily informs him that that’s exactly the direction he’s heading with every stroke, this image (that of the stereotypical “creepy old person”) is brought back down to earth, made poignant once more, and reversed. Here, it’s Dave’s relative good health that brings goosebumps to exposed skin. The film is undeniably funny, too, complicating this iconography still further. But when the laughter and the music stop, the discomfort is bone-deep.
Conclusion
Of course, the monsters hiding under the skin are just as brutal as the one hiding behind the hospital curtain, and that awareness is the film’s greatest, most understated triumph. Dave’s creepy punishments and pontifications are agonizing indignities, but the adorable cat lurks patiently just out of sight, ready to pad her deadly way around any carpeted corner. Stefan’s love of poetry carries him through his torment, but his cognitive tests show a marked decline that even he eventually knows won’t reverse itself. “When did I become this? Stupid and bitter,” he laments to Tony in his bed, a tear falling down his wrinkled, stroke-frozen cheek “I once thought of myself as a good man.” How does that line go again? “Look at my Works, oh Mighty, and despair”? Well, close enough.
The Rule of Jenny Pen premiered at the 2024 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
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