The Rule of Jenny Pen: Film Review
John Lithgow has quite the acting range. Shortly after hearing he’ll play Dumbledore in the Harry Potter TV series, I watched him as a psychopath in The Rule of Jenny Pen!
James Ashcroft‘s psychological horror, based on a short story by Owen Marshall, is set in a New Zealand care home, where Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush) resides after being discharged from hospital following a stroke. He and his fellow residents, including his roommate Tony Garfield (George Henare), are terrorised by longtime patient Dave Crealy (Lithgow) and his creepy therapy hand puppet, Jenny Pen.
Dave uses the puppet, which is a freaky baby doll without any eyes, to torment and bully the residents when the staff aren’t looking, including nightly visits to Stefan and Tony’s room. When Stefan complains about Dave’s abuse, the staff gaslight him and suggest he’s losing his mind, so he decides to take matters into his own hands.
Ashcroft does a terrific job of getting us instead Stefan’s mind by using clever sound design to communicate his cognitive decline. The film is told from his perspective, but he’s an unreliable narrator; he insists he’s fine, but the staff think otherwise. It’s hard to know what the truth is. Is Dave as bad as we see or is Stefan losing it?
Despite an iffy New Zealand accent, Lithgow delivers an unsettling performance as the psychotic creep who lords over the residents. He’s a very unnerving presence, but there were times where he went OTT and I started to find him funny. I don’t know if that was intentional.
Rush is also excellent as a cantankerous old man who refuses to let Jenny Pen rule over him like she does the others. He portrays Stefan as a paranoid man who cannot trust his own mind or the care staff to protect him from elder abuse. He is also frustrated being confined to a wheelchair with no use of one hand in such a scary situation.
The Rule of Jenny Pen is a claustrophobic thriller with two committed lead performances, but the narrative didn’t completely work for me.
In cinemas from Friday 14th March and on Shudder from 28th March