THE RULE OF JENNY PEN - Mark Reviews Movies

The Rule of Jenny Pen, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 6, 2025

The story of The Rule of Jenny Pen doesn't make too much sense. Part of that is built in to director James Ashcroft and Eli Kent's screenplay (an adaptation of a short story by Owen Marshall), because the story revolves around a character whose mind is increasingly succumbing to the effects of a stroke and, likely, dementia. The rest of it is that the tale also revolves around an antagonist who is so over-the-top in his villainy that the movie never feels grounded in any of these characters or the things it might want to say about aging. It's tough to take it seriously.

That's another concern here, too. Does the movie itself want us to take it seriously in the first place?

It seems that way when we're introduced to Stephan (Geoffrey Rush), a judge based in an unnamed city of New Zealand, who has a debilitating medical emergency in his courtroom during a sentencing hearing. In the middle of admonishing a man convicted of multiple counts of abuse against children, Stephan become distracted and begins chiding the mother of one of the victims, before collapsing to the ground. He awakens in a care facility, located in a remote part of the country.

Now primarily mobile by way of a motorized wheelchair, Stephan is stuck in this place, despite his belief that he'll return to his regular life after recovering. The staff is far less optimistic, even if they don't communicate much about what's happening to the judge, don't listen to his fears and worries, and don't seem to notice that there's basically a psychopath living among the other residents of the facility.

That man is Dave (John Lithgow), who wanders the halls and haunts the group spaces of the care home—always with a puppet attached to one of his hands. He calls the creepy baby doll, with holes where its missing eyes should be, "Jenny Pen," and at first, he seems a relatively harmless older man, who likely lives in the secure ward of the facility.

Prone to singing and dancing and talking to the puppet in secret, Dave suddenly appears in Stephan's room one night. Without a word and with no warning, he dumps a container of Stephan's own urine on the judge's crotch. His roommate—a former rugby player, who retired after a knee injury, named Tony (George Henare)—denies that Dave was in the room, and because Stephan is showing signs of cognitive decline, no one in charge believes his accusation of Dave's assault.

The rest of the story becomes a discomforting horror show. That's not only because Dave's actions and behavior become increasingly violent and volatile. It's also because Ashcroft steps up right to the line of trying to find some twisted humor in the villain, the other residents of the facility, and some of the physical and mental debilitations faced by these characters.

Dave quickly reveals himself to be a nasty customer. He tortures Tony by way of that persistent injury and a newly placed catheter tube—forcing Tony to lick the back of his hand, which he refers to as a different part of Jenny Pen's body, as a form of submission. He kicks Stephan in the leg repeatedly under a dining table until it starts to look like the judge's limb might break, and at one point, Dave sends a woman with severe memory issues into the wilderness surrounding the facility.

Most of the story is seen from Stephan's perspective, meaning that there are some early doubts that what our protagonist sees of and experiences by way of Dave is actually happening. Eventually, there is no doubt, because Dave's assorted schemes and acts take over at certain points in the narrative—seen entirely from his point of view and treated almost comically, since he is, in addition to being a sadist, an older man who can't always pull off his awful tricks without error.

Whatever tension is supposed to exist here, of course, comes from how helpless Stephan, as well as every other resident targeted by Dave, is. He certainly is physically helpless, and apart from his steadfast determination not to give in to Dave's demands, that quality, along with the cognitive decline, becomes the defining one of his character.

As good as Rush may playing the role and offering some semblance of more going on beneath Stephan's frail surface, the actor and his character are decidedly overshadowed by Dave. That's especially on account of how fully invested Lithgow's performance is, playing the villain with a sinister twinkle in his eye, a perverse smile at his foul deeds, and level of desperation that offers some intriguing insight into this dastardly figure. We don't learn much about the man, except that he worked at this place for decades before becoming a resident and had a brief encounter with Stephan in the past, which made him realize how little he had accomplished in life.

There's obviously an attempt at something deeper in The Rule of Jenny Pen—about control and society and a battle of wills between two men with opposing views of power. None of that really comes through within the movie, however, because its tone, narrative, and perspective are far too messy.

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