My Shudder Pick of the Month is the Stephen King-Approved The Rule of Jenny Pen, a Compelling Look at the Horror of Aging With Great Turns from John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush
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My Shudder pick for March is the 2024 oldsploitation shocker The Rule of Jenny Pen, a Shudder original that Stephen King enthusiastically recommended. King is generous with his praise. You could argue that he is excessively kind, but there are worse transgressions.
Few things are scarier or more poignantly universal than growing old. We live in a world that worships youth and abhors old age. We’re taught from an early age that young people’s lives have value, meaning, potential, and purpose, while senior citizens are personal and societal burdens waiting around to die.
There’s nothing more terrifying than the prospect of losing our youth, health, vigor, societal importance, sanity, and life. Old age lends itself so naturally to horror that it seems strange that there aren’t horror movies with old people as heroes or villains.
The 2024 New Zealand psychological thriller opens with anti-hero Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush) in his element.
The steely strength and power he exudes at the beginning makes the vulnerability and powerless he will go on to face even more poignant.
We open with Stefan in court delivering a stern verdict. He’s a judge by trade and judgmental by disposition. In this opening scene he delivers a harsh tongue lashing to a woman he considers culpable as well.
Stefan is the ultimate power in his courtroom but after a stroke he finds himself unhappily imprisoned in an assisted living home he considers only slightly preferable to death.
He goes from being able to determine the futures of the luckless souls in his court to being powerless. For Stefan, hell is other people, specifically the fellow residents of his new home.
Stefan is a misanthrope who has paid a steep price for his richly merited hatred of humanity. He doesn’t appear to have families or friends, or anyone he could stay with.
The depressed judge labors under the delusion that his time in the nursing home is limited, and that as soon as he recovers sufficiently he’ll go back to living on his own.
The staff of the nursing home know otherwise. The power that Stefan wielded in court means nothing in this grim new context. He’s just another old man in a wheelchair longing desperately a release that will never come.
Stefan is not a nice man. He’s a miserable bastard who does nothing to hide his contempt for the old folks home he finds himself in and its residents. When he’s told that his Maori roommate, Tony Garfield (George Henare), is a famous retired rugby player, he quips bitterly that his primary experience with the game involves presiding over the sexual assault trials of athletes.
The protagonist is not sympathetic, but he is relatable in his misery. There’s a darkly funny early scene where an entertainer performs the WW2 era novelty song “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” for the nursing home residents, and Stefan glares at the annoyingly upbeat singer in a way that suggests he would happily beat him to death if he could.
Rush’s prickly codger is miserable before he encounters Dave Crealy, a mentally ill man who has been terrorizing his colleagues with the titular baby doll puppet, which is creepy under the best of circumstances.
John Lithgow, who can play the nicest man in the world or evil incarnate, throws himself into the role of the film’s unforgettable villain. He even has a killer New Zealand accent.
In The Rule of Jenny Pen, the childlike elements of the nursing home take on a sinister quality. Co-writer/director James Ashcroft brilliantly uses the malevolent nature of old novelty songs, clamorous ditties that amused the public ages ago but now merely unnerve and disturb.
Lithgow’s creepily intense performance of the British “Knees Up Mother Brown” is pure nightmare fuel. The Rule of Jenny Pen makes inspired use of the ominous auras of ancient, raggedy dolls and crackly old pop songs only the very old half-remember.
In his arrogance, Stefan makes the mistake of making Dave the subject of one of his intricately worded, verbose insults. This makes the nursing home’s resident sadist single him out for physical and emotional abuse.
The mysterious weirdo is all about power and domination. Like an even more evil version of Carrot Top, Dave is all about props. Also like Carrot Top, Dave uses his props for evil, to menace the most vulnerable among us until death begins to look like an even more appealing option. The title comes from Dave forcing Tony to kiss the puppet’s posterior and admit that Jenny rules them.
Stefan wants his arch-nemesis to pay for his bullying, but Dave, who has seemingly always been at the nursing home like Jack Torrance has ALWAYS been the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, knows how to work the system.
Dave is a monster who terrorizes the elderly but is also a lonely old man. The Rule of Jenny Pen allows us to feel unexpected empathy for him despite his not doing anything that is even vaguely admirable. In his own way, Dave is a victim of life’s cruelty and his own inner ugliness, but he’s channeled all of his malevolent energy into victimizing others.
The Rule of Jenny Pen is an atypical horror movie. You can count the dead bodies on one hand and still have two fingers left over. It’s about mood and atmosphere more than carnage or gore.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I tend to confuse Geoffrey Rush and Stephen Rea. The Rule of Jenny Pen reminded me of Rea’s heartbreaking performances as a middle-class man who fell into homelessness before being hit by a car and getting stuck in a windshield and left to bleed to death.
Stuck is a horror movie whose monsters are capitalism and indifference. It’s about the free-floating terror of being homeless and without options and consequently invisible to the world.
Stuck was also about the horror of getting old. Its all-too-relatable antihero/villain has a supremely depressing job cleaning up after senior citizens in a rundown nursing home. She hates her job and life. She tries to block out the misery with MDMA and alcohol, leading to tragic and deadly consequences.
Like Stuck, which was based on a horrifying true story, The Rule of Jenny Pen is grounded in despair, loneliness, and confusion.
The Rule of Jenny Pen hit close to home. Poor Stefan’s predicament reminded me of my father, who similarly is in a nursing home that he would like very much to leave. It made me reflect on my powerlessness and how I can’t be the active, involved son I want to be but can’t because I live 800 miles away and can’t afford to visit regularly.
I found The Rule of Jenny Pen thoroughly engaging, even as it doesn’t build to a climax so much as it ends in a disappointing straightforward fashion.
Otherwise, this was a warped winner with terrific performances from two great actors with tremendous chemistry.
It’s like the ill-conceived Mel Gibson vehicle The Beaver but horrific, or rather an even more disturbing version of The Beaver, one that is intentionally viscerally unnerving.
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