Inspired by Owen Marshall’s sadistic short story, James Ashcroft turns sinister puppeteer by having Geoffrey Rush face an equally hilarious and hellish hand puppet. From the outside, the New Zealand director’s twisted debut feature looks like another entry to the horror sub-genre about demonic dolls. The poster shows John Lithgow ominously presenting the titular hand puppet by the name of Jenny Pen. However, despite its evil facial expression, the eerie vintage toy is indeed only an inanimate object. As such it becomes the instrument and symbol of the malevolence of his elderly owner: Dave Crealy (Lithgow), a dementia-feigning resident of the upscale retirement home Royal Pine Mews.
At this deceptively benign residence for the affluent, elderly rigorous judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush) ends up after a stroke. He’s left partially paralyzed, but is still mobile with a wheelchair and retains his dismissive temper. His amiable roommate and former rugby star Tony Garfield (George Henare) is quite the opposite. The two are united by their common enemy Crealy who takes cruel pleasure in tormenting the other inmates. While the nursing staff take him for a harmless dodderer, Crealy – always accompanied by Jenny Pen – routinely humiliates his fellow inmates. His mere presence is enough to kill the small joys they have left.
Since Mortensen refuses to bend to the titular rule and even tries to defend other inmates, he becomes Crealy’s main target. While old people are a steady presence in genre films, they rarely have all the main parts. Ashcroft and his co-writer Eli Kent make old age and the unusual setting key elements of their plot and its unsettling air. As the animosity between Mortensen und Crealy becomes ever more violent, the seemingly harmonious surroundings reveal their casual inhumanity. The staff hardly registers what goes on among inmates and treats them as intellectual inferiors, unable to plot or perceive anything, good or bad. Their noncompliance and neglect are drastically visualized early on.
Another wheelchair-bound inmate burns to death when his cigarette ignites his clothing. Mortensen watches in helpless horror. What he sees is actually a preview of the disregard towards his own pleas for help against Crealy. As he drives Mortensen ever closer to the medical and mental edge, it becomes obvious how deeply mistreatment of the elderly is ingrained in the care system. When the perfidious plot finally reveals Crealy’s personal background, it adds a symbolic edge to his viciousness. This allegorical subtext increases the purely psychological terror of a person relishing in arbitrary cruelty. It establishes Crealy as both product and personification of a dehumanizing, dysfunctional institution.
This institution worsens the physical incapacitation many inhabitants suffer by intellectually incapacitating them. Sinister humor and a soundtrack often relying on diegetic music accentuate this nasty irony. Occasionally Ashcroft gets carried away with the evil fun he’s clearly having. Some of Crealy’s fatal devilries seem a bit too outrageous. But compelling performances by Rush, Lithgow and Henare counterbalance these absurdist antics. A faded color palette and depressingly dull location retain a bleak realism more frightening than any demonic toy could ever be. Ashcroft’s delightful midnight movie serves as a terrifying reminder that evil has no age and hell is built out of ignorance and indifference.
- OT: The Rule of Jenny Pen
- Director: James Ashcroft
- Screenplay: James Ashcroft, Eli Kent, Owen Marshall
- Year: 2024
- Distribution | Production © Charade Films
