Producers: Catherine Fitzgerald and Orlando Stewart Director: James Ashcroft Screenplay: Eli Kent and James Ashcroft Cast: John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Hilary Joyce, Maaka Pohatu, Paolo Rotondo, Ian Mune, Anapela Polataivao, Fiona Collins, Yvette Parsons and Hannah Lynch Distributor: IFC Films/Shudder
Grade: C+
Any film that brings together John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush can’t help but be interesting, and both seem to be having great fun playing off one another in “The Rule of Jenny Pen.” But sadly, the movie is a psychological thriller that’s unsettling but doesn’t make much sense.
Director James Ashcroft’s film, like his last “Coming Home in the Dark” (2021), is based on a short story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall and was co-written by Eli Kent. It’s sort of a gender-reversal version of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” set at a senior care home called Royal Pine Mews.
Rush’s Stefan Mortensen is a new arrival there, a stern judge who, we see in a prologue, has suffered a stroke while sentencing a child abuser and berating the mother of the victim for letting it happen. Now confined to a wheelchair, he insists to the staff that he intends to recover and return to his normal life, but their prognosis is not good.
Mortensen is not a terribly likable person; he’s arrogant, sharp-tongued and intolerant of his roommate Tony Garfield (George Henare), a former rugby player whose leg injury left him with a limp. But he’s not so insensitive as to react with indifference when a fellow resident (Ian Mune), an old fellow who refuses to give up his habit of smoking and drinking simultaneously, accidentally self-immolates on the backyard patio to which Stefan has retreated for some fresh air.
Still, despite his condescending attitude, Stefan might have found the home tolerable but for the presence of Dave Crealy (Lithgow), a long-time resident (and, as the judge will learn from a wall full of photos, a former staff member). Crealy wears on his left hand Jenny Penn, a bald baby doll from which the eyes have been removed. Jenny might have originated as a therapy doll for Crealy, but he’s turned her into an instrument of terror that he wields against other residents, forcing them to admit that she rules the place and to perform humiliating obeisance to her. Poor, submissive Garfield is a constant target. Stefan will become another—for reasons that Crealy, in a monologue late in the film, suggests.
The mistreatment of the two roommates is hardly the worst thing that their sadistic tormentor is responsible for, however. He’s actually responsible for the death of Eunice Joyce (Hilary Norris), an elderly woman suffering from dementia whose delusion that her family is coming to take her home he takes advantage of in a particularly awful way. True, his panic at being discovered in the aftermath indicates that beneath the cruelty he’s riddled with fear, and his desperation to cover his tracks leads to one of the film’s most excited sequences. But the staff’s indifference to Stefan’s complaints about him, and their genial acceptance of his doll, indicate that he doesn’t have much to worry about. (So does their absence during his nocturnal ramblings about the place.) Indeed, the only creature that seems to take much notice is the resident cat Pluto (played by a feline named Marbles).
In due course the judge proves as ruthless as Crealy in his own way. Noticing that Crealy’s severely asthmatic, he crafts an opportunity to take advantage of his medical needs. And in the end he seeks to enlist his reluctant roommate to seek a revenge that’s as ghastly as anything Crealy has done.
“Jenny Pen” gets no points for plausibility, but in the hands of Ashcroft and his technical team—production designer Zahra Archer Monogue, cinematographer Matt Henley and editor Gretchen Peterson—along with the moody score by John Gibson, it creates a mood of quiet dread that the stars sink their teeth, or dentures, into. Rush sneers and harrumphs with Dickensian glee, while also eliciting sympathy as the increasingly helpless Mortensen suffers at Crealy’s hand. And while Lithgow has gleefully played outrageous villains in the past—just think of “Blow Out,” “Cliffhanger” and “Ricochet,” to name a few—he’s never been better at the task than here, exuding menace that periodically breaks out into hysterical floor shows in the commons room.
For all the pleasure one might help in watching Lithgow and Rush chew up the scenery, though, the fact remains that the menu is inferior. As far as Grand Guignol goes, Davis and Crawford had it better.