I remember seeing the trailers for The Rule of Jenny Pen back at the end of 2024, and I was intrigued. Two old timers in a nursing home, one played by Geoffrey Rush, the other by John Lithgow, seem to be locking horns with Lithgow essentially terrorizing the entire community while welding a hand puppet, the title character, and Rush seemingly powerless to stop him. That could be quite interesting. The movie had a short release to theaters before going exclusively to Shudder, meaning there was a decent chance I would put it on a watchlist and maybe get to it eventually.
Apparently, last night was “eventually.”
Judge Stefan Mortensen (Rush) suffers a stroke on the bench while sentencing a pedophile to a prison sentence and berating the mother of the victims for letting the guy into her house and not doing something about it. It’s the sort of moment that tells you everything you need to know about the judge. The stroke lands Stefan in a so-so nursing home where he thinks he’ll be back on his feet as soon as he gets feeling back on the other side of his body. Stefan is something of a snob from the get-go, complaining that he has to share a room with retired rugby player Tony (George Henare). Stefan has little patience for the other old man, but he has little patience for just about everybody even as he loses time and flashes through time and space.
But there’s another problem in the form of long time resident Dave Crealy (Lithgow), who plays senile during the day and carries a hand puppet named “Jenny Pen” everywhere. Crealy is a bully and a tormentor, a man who gets away with a lot of horrible abuse of other residents because the staff either ignores him or assumes he’s harmless. Stefan is outraged, and Dave starts up on the judge almost immediately, dumping a pitcher of water on the judge’s crotch to make it look like Stefan peed his pants. The abuse gets worse from there, and Stefan cannot understand why the other residents let this sort of thing happen. Can Stefan find a way to overcome Dave?
I went into this one expecting to see a lot of Rush and Lithgow locking horns, and while that does happen, the movie belongs far more to Rush than to Lithgow. Rush’s mind has trouble focusing, and there are many moments throughout the movie showing Rush waking up in other places where he isn’t sure how he got there, and that does add a layer of concern as Lithgow’s Dave even takes a moment to whisper that Stefan will be a vegetable who will never get out of the group home. Now, I don’t think the movie ever suggests that Stefan is an unreliable narrator–there are witnesses beyond Stefan and the movie shows Dave being awful all on his own–but Stefan’s mental decline adds to the atmosphere of the movie.
Now, there is one thing that doesn’t quite add up, and that’s how much Dave is able to get away with. He’s not a subtle man. He’s the guy who will stumble through a dance lesson, deliberately stepping on feet and knocking people over until he’s the last guy on the dance floor, and somehow none of the caretakers seem to notice. Yes, part of the idea here is the care home isn’t that good, but they’d have to be blind not to suspect some foul play in some instances. They don’t necessarily need to suspect Dave, but they should suspect something, right? It’s actually a minor complaint in an otherwise well-constructed
Grade: B+
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