The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

***/****
starring John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Nathaniel Lees
written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft, based on the short story by Owen Marshall
directed by James Ashcroft

by Waler Chaw James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen scares the shit out of me. Not just as a horror movie, but also as a reminder of how our elder-care system is so broken that most of us will end up dying at the hands of overworked caregivers in underfunded facilities. My plan is to kill myself before the dementia takes over completely, but that boat may have already sailed. In The Rule of Jenny Pen, Eunice (Hilary Norris), a dear old thing, believes that every day is Christmas, and tells everyone her family is due to visit. Every day ends with her disappointed, but then she wakes up the next morning thinking it’s Christmas again, thus hope springs eternal. We later learn that she’s been in this loop for years. Is she in Hell or is she in Heaven? Is anticipation sweet, or is it torture? Was Sisyphus happy because he knew what was expected of him? At a terminal point, is there much difference between sweet delight and endless night? Is there much of a difference between this limbo in God’s waiting room and the limbo of lives meted out in coffee spoons and the long shadows of regret?

The Rule of Jenny Pen is essentially a madhouse/prison melodrama relocated to a nursing home, which has elements of both (madhouses and prisons) made even more poisonous by the addition of physical infirmity. It’s a dig at how inaction fuels fascism, how victims sometimes (inevitably?) become victimizers when the opportunity presents itself and how prisoners are desperate for advocates because they’ve lost their physical freedom, been stripped of their voice, and robbed of their credibility. We all become part of this minority–the elderly–by failing to die. Horror movies set in nursing homes come with a payload of existential dread. They are spiritual sequels to Make Way for Tomorrow.

I’m scared because, unless providence strikes, I won’t be able to retire. If I lose my wits, well… What if the best happens and I still wind up like Gene Hackman? My wife dead upstairs while I wander around the house for days, forgetting, remembering, forgetting, remembering. Who do I talk to about negotiating a clean exit? Stefan (Geoffrey Rush) is a judge, a tough and, by all appearances, respected one. As The Rule of Jenny Pen opens, he’s bringing the gavel down on a freshly convicted child molester, directing a good portion of his ire at the mother of the victim for her culpability in her child’s violation. If that seems like a bridge too far, blame the onset of the first of Stefan’s debilitating strokes. He wakes up in long-term hospice care, half-paralyzed but vowing a swift recovery and return to the bench, esteem fully restored and ready to continue his career. Alas, just like everyone in the Big House maintains they’re innocent, everyone in the old-folks’ home seems similarly sure they’re about to de-age enough to return to the wild. I think there’s meant to be irony in Stefan’s stentorian, some would say draconian authoritarianism in his courtroom compared to his compromised, undignified reality post-collapse, though it’s not necessary to draw so sharp a relief. At a certain point, aging is undignified for everyone.

Initially, I was worried The Rule of Jenny Pen would be eldersploitation in which a beautiful mind mocks his addled peers–a variation on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which frankly hasn’t aged well. Early on, when Stefan cruelly skewered an old man’s love for the Tom Clancy novels his family brings him, I considered checking out. I don’t mind ambiguity in my protagonists, but the major miscalculation of Ashcroft’s film is that I don’t get any kick from seeing a miserable old bastard get what’s coming to him. I mean, look at him–it’s not like he’s the President or something. I did like when Stefan appears to be making friends with a tubercular man in a wheelchair, Howie (Ian Mune), sharing a cigarette and an illicit, chummy swig from a purloined flask with him while the two giggle about their fates. I thought this was the leadup to a Bubba Ho-Tep buddy thing–maybe something out of the Wild Hogs or Bucket List school of good-times geezer-teaser. (Cocoon, maybe?) But The Rule of Jenny Pen doesn’t see aging as adorable or empowering. It sees aging as atrocity mixed with a healthy draught of nihilism, and so it immolates sweet Howie in a pyre of his own creation while newly-minted pal Stefan looks on impotently. An overpowering sense of helplessness–the loss of agency and autonomy–animates every wrinkle of this film. Watch Ashcroft’s unflinching considerations of aged bodies, his camera hovering over every lump and sag as human beings are sprayed down and scrubbed like zoo animals while the animals themselves squeeze shut their eyes in humiliation. There’s a scene where Stefan nearly drowns in the bath when his caregiver rushes off to another emergency, and it’s difficult to tell if Stefan’s trying as hard as he possibly can to save himself. I know from experience how the siren’s song gets sweeter now and again.

But Stefan is a fighter. He’s outraged by his body’s betrayal and further offended when that betrayal manifests in the nocturnal shenanigans of the infernal Mr. Crealy (John Lithgow). Crealy’s omnipresent, id-possessed hand puppet, Jenny, acts as henchman and spokesperson. After hours, Jenny and Mr. Crealy sneak into the other residents’ rooms, rifling through their belongings, stealing panties and false teeth for unsavory purposes and occasionally pouring pints of urine on ailing judges. When Stefan refuses to cow to his tormentor’s demand that he “lick [Jenny’s] arsehole” (i.e., Crealy’s wrist), Mr. Crealy’s bullying extends to savage kicks beneath the lunch table, racist jokes at the expense of poor Mr. Ausage (Nathaniel Lees), and the occasional mean-spirited assisted-murder, why not? I love how a moment of relative bliss where the community enjoys a dance in a cleared-out dining room is ruined by Mr. Crealy pirouetting among them, mincing and mashing feet, moshing the brittle and unsteady, his eyes fixed on Jenny’s plastic visage as though lost in rapture with her. The Rule of Jenny Pen doesn’t try very hard to psychoanalyze Mr. Crealy, to the picture’s benefit. It’s content instead to show a man no longer entirely in control of his malice and his malign impact on everyone around him.

It all has a blackness about it, a hysterical tension and an inexorable doom that reminded me a lot of Jan Egleson’s pitch-black A Shock to the System. Stories like these, of madness and misdirected vengeance, can only end in tears. Mr. Crealy is at once a fiend and an object of pity: just an old man, after all, but now the king of Shit Mountain because his decline is slower than that of his peers. He has found at the end of his life a kind of perverse influence we presume he never enjoyed during the bloom of it, and suddenly a metaphor emerges for all the losers and grievance-swollen weirdos given our nuclear codes and social security numbers. Is The Rule of Jenny Pen a tragedy? Certainly–but for whom? Fear is the root of every evil in this film and decrepitude the frustration that fuels every violent action. If there’s something to mourn, it’s us. This is who we are, and we were a mistake. At our terminus, our ugliness is exposed. It is hypocrisy to judge others and hopeless to expect grace for our sins. The horror of Ashcroft’s film is its clarity. We shall die as we live: neglected by bureaucrats; abandoned by systems; stranded at the mercy of criminal monsters glad to hurry us to our dusty deaths.