Review of "The Rule of Jenny Pen"
A Gavel Falls Silent, a Puppet Rises
Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), once a towering figure dispensing justice with theatrical gravitas—think berating a pedophile’s indifferent mother from the bench—suffers a stroke that strips him of bodily command. Gone is his courtroom pedestal; now, he’s wheeled into a nursing home, a quiet limbo where many linger through life’s final pages. Here, he crosses paths with Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), a blue-eyed menace whose obsession with a glove puppet named Jenny Pen casts a sinister shadow. Through her, Dave dictates his twisted rules, turning nightfall into a dreaded countdown for his fellow residents.
Where Cynthia Scott’s serene "Strangers in Good Company" saw elderly women reflect tenderly on their years in isolation, James Ashcroft’s "The Rule of Jenny Pen" offers no such peace. Its inhabitants aren’t lost in nostalgia—they’re plotting survival. Dave concocts fresh cruelties (dousing a patient with urine, nudging an old woman beyond safe grounds), while Stefan schemes retaliation (a formal complaint? Swiping the puppeteer’s asthma inhaler?). Their roommate, ex-rugby player Tony Garfield (George Henare), scrambles for escape (the laundry room, perhaps?), desperate to dodge Dave’s latest “kiss for Penny.”
What begins as a duel between two stubborn old men escalates into all-out war, reason and restraint swept away like debris in a storm. At dusk, Stefan roams the near-empty corridors in his wheelchair, searching for answers. Like Jack Torrance arriving at the Overlook, Rush’s judge assumes he’ll weather a season or two in this strange purgatory and reclaim his old life. But the home drains him, leaching the cold arrogance of a magistrate into the weary husk of just another forgotten soul—memory, mind, and even the strength to grip a paper cup slipping away. Jenny Pen feels poised to leap from the shadows, a dementor ready to siphon his final months. Yet it’s Dave who reappears—aged Dave, young Dave, a boyish Dave—his photographs plastered on his door and the facility’s walls. Wait—how long has he been tormenting this place? What was he up to in the 1960s?
As viewers puzzle over the timeline, Lithgow dances a wicked jig with gleeful malice, while Rush spits defiance and furiously spins his chair’s wheels. Their showdown is an acting masterclass, neither outshone. Rush charts Stefan’s arc from haughty to hollow with surgical precision; Lithgow juggles a kaleidoscope of emotions, as if Jenny Pen pulls his strings instead. No wonder the Sitges Film Festival handed them a shared Best Actor prize—picking a standout is a fool’s errand.
The film unfolds like a fever dream, stitched from recurring motifs, close-ups of vacant faces, and a relentless hum of cries, groans, and whispers. “Beware that cat,” a resident warns, nodding at a still feline nearby. “It’s a harbinger of death.” Stefan shrugs it off, but moments later, the speaker flares up like a kerosene-soaked match. The shock lands only with the audience—staff and residents barely blink, their stoicism hinting this is routine, perhaps five times a day.
In this New Zealand nursing home, death and its trappings are met with a shrug. No one bothers with security footage, nighttime checks, or sorting out why two old men shatter dishes, yell, and trade barbs daily. Royal Pine Mews is a place where time has congealed—what happens matters less than what doesn’t: any real effort to curb the chaos.
Jenny Pen drapes herself in red curtains, looms doorway-high, ducks into drawers, and slips tiny hands into the mouths of dying elders. She thrives on their despair and the staff’s apathy, a wraith gliding through locked rooms. Early on, Stefan’s lofty disdain and Dave’s outrageous antics might coax a smirk, but the dark humor soon waltzes with tragedy. In this world, freedom comes only when the curtain falls.
