Three decades on from Brian De Palma’s gleefully unhinged psychological thriller Raising Cain, John Lithgow has once again found a cinematic role to showcase his panache for exuding deranged evil. New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen, following up his Sundance-selected Coming Home in the Dark, finds Lithgow as Dave Crealy, a nursing-home resident who delights in unleashing a torrent of psychological and physical torment against cohabitants of the facility, most notably newly arrived Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush). While loogies are hawked and bags of piss thrown about in the film’s more absurdly mounted sequences, Ashcroft is digging into the underbelly of such facilities as caretakers ignore genuine feelings for the geriatric in order to maintain the status quo of keeping people temporarily happy and sedated. While the result is a half-entertaining showcase for Lithgow, a satisfying point to this interminable deprivation never manages to emerge.
Adapting Owen Marshall’s short story, Ashcroft and co-writer Eli Kent waste little time getting to the film’s solitary locale after the opening scene finds Judge Stefan Mortensen suffering a stroke on the bench. Whisked away to a retirement home which the now partially paralyzed Mortensen is led to believe is a temporary situation until he recovers, all is not right from the get-go. There’s a dark, foreboding mood stagnating through quiet rooms and halls. A fellow resident gets lit on fire after a mishap involving his cigarettes and alcohol. Was it a freak accident, or was a curse put upon? All starts to become more clear when we’re introduced to the freakishly smiling Dave, who barks at any caretaker attempting to pry from his hands Jenny Pen, a therapy doll he was encouraged to get in order to deal with dementia. When he sets sights on Stefan as the next target of his wicked games––using Jenny Pen as his mouthpiece and slyly concealed from those in charge––a battle of geriatric abuse commences.
With actors so accomplished as Lithgow and Rush going tit-for-tat and provided leeway to ham up the vitriol and stretch their prowess for physicality, The Rule of Jenny Pen isn’t without merits. Rush is clearly delighting to embody a curmudgeonly demeanor, spewing barbs at everyone (from caretakers to fellow residents) that comes in his path, while Lithgow’s exaggerated evil lifts the film out of its stupor. As Stefan’s roommate Tony, George Henare offers a more grounded, impressive turn in the ensemble. Yet by the umpteenth act of vile attacks, the charade of hijinks begins to sour into an interminable endurance test. As Ashcroft employs longer takes in close-ups, showing the men being bathed in all their misery––including an unnecessarily manipulative scene of a near-drowning––the viewer starts to feel as suffocatingly trapped as those inside the facility. It’s only when the film becomes more absurdly gleeful in its perverse tricks––from De Palma-esque split-diopter shots to Lithgow stepping on everyone’s feet during a community dance session to fantastical depictions of Jenny Pen––that were snatched from a somnambulant parade of horrors.
It’s not often we get features solely about the elderly, much less set entirely in a nursing home, and though Ashcraft makes the most of his locale with sharp, moody cinematography and enveloping, haunting sound design, The Rule of Jenny Pen seems a missed opportunity. Its most affecting moments are seeing the ways in which those shelling out money to be cared for are gaslit by the very caretakers attempting to convince them nothing is amiss. With those passages too few and far between, it’s Lithgow’s committed, eccentric performance that elevates an otherwise repetitive, blunt horror offering. As the actor begins to prepare for “the last chapter” of his life, in his own words, by portraying one of the most beloved characters in modern culture, there’s something sordidly humorous that he’s stepping into it directly after playing one of the most vile characters of his career.
The Rule of Jenny Pen opens in theaters on Friday, March 7.