Sudden ageing is a familiar trope in horror films, recently revitalised in The Substance. For this is a horror we all face, unless we die young. A prospect to terrify naturally, even without being fantastically elaborated.
The Rule of Jenny Pen – the second film from New Zealand director James Ashcroft, following the brutal road movie Coming Home in the Dark – takes a tougher approach. The ruination of old age has already come upon its protagonists, only for worse to follow. Save for a brief prologue, it is set entirely in a care home.
We meet Judge Stefan Mortensen (the great Geoffrey Rush, 73, in his first role for six years) contemptuously presiding over his courtroom. Carefully squashing an insect crawling over his desk, he sentences a paedophile to 16 years, before turning with equal disdain to the mother of his victims, telling her she too is culpable, having put her children at risk. “Where there are no lions, hyenas rule,” he loftily pronounces. But, as he speaks, the judge is collapsing, losing his thread, suffering a major stroke, the camera reeling, losing focus.
We next see him in a wheelchair, arriving at a care home where most of the residents are helpless and confused. Though partially paralysed, his intellect and pride are unimpaired. He insists he will get better soon. Told he’ll just love his new room-mate, Tony (George Henare, 79), who played rugby for New Zealand, he replies: “I fear the intersection of our interests may be a tad narrow – my exposure to rugby has largely been limited to watching its players dodge rape charges.” Left in the bath, he tries to drown himself.
Worse awaits, though. The care home harbours a monster. Long-term resident Dave Crealy (John Lithgow, 79), doddering around in an open dressing-gown, presents himself to staff as addled, mute and benign, expressing himself through an empty-eyed baby doll, known as Jenny Pen, one of the toys helpfully given to dementia patients as therapy.
In fact, Crealy is sly, strong and psychotically malevolent. At night, he roams the place, tormenting the residents. Thrusting Jenny Pen into Tony’s face in the shared room in the middle of the night, he, or she, demands: “Who rules?” Tony, terrified, is forced to say that she does and kiss her arse, the back of Crealy’s hand. Then Jenny Pen grossly sexually assaults him.
There’s nothing supernatural here. Although Jenny Pen’s eye-sockets glow and her expression changes, Crealy’s puppeteering is token, her voice his. It’s human cruelty we are seeing, for all the lurid red colouration and distorted camera angles.
The Rule of Jenny Pen is made by the performances of Rush and Lithgow, playing off each other, as Crealy realises the judge is not going to cower before him like the others, and the judge, despite a growing disability and the indifference of the staff, resolves to fight back.
John Lithgow is an actor easily presenting as likeable, trustworthy and authoritative (just cast as Dumbledore in the forthcoming HBO Harry Potter adaptation). But he transforms astonishingly into a villain (notably in Raising Cain and Dexter), hard, focused and scary, even at this stage of his career. Here he shifts in a second from crazy laughter to cold intent, from an appearance of harmless absence to a face of pure evil. It’s a tremendously powerful performance that propels the movie. Crealy recalls seeing the judge in his pomp. When he looks back on his own life, “it is like looking into an empty bin”. Now, though, he has the advantage. “We all get what’s coming to us in the end,” he says, before attacking.
It’s all very well for the judge, in extremis, to quote Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms for inspiration: “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong in the broken places.” Crealy’s response is a wild dance with Jenny Pen, chanting, “Knees up, Mother Brown.”
The Rule of Jenny Pen (much admired by Stephen King, incidentally) is unlike other horrors or thrillers in the way it confronts the realistic, even humdrum, fears of ageing: infirmity and diminished physical capacity, losing agency, no longer being able to defend oneself against harm, losing all control of one’s circumstances, the body collapsing even though the mind remains. It makes the NHS geriatric ward depicted in Alan Bennett’s pantomime Allelujah! look chipper. It belongs rather in the company of Kingsley Amis’s underrated nasty novel Ending Up or even Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori. Not much of a date movie, perhaps, but fair warning: under the table you must go.
“The Rule of Jenny Pen” is in cinemas now
[See also: In Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho misses the moment]
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This article appears in the 12 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why Britain isn’t working