Directed by:
James AshcroftCinematography:
Matt HenleyCast:
Geoffrey Rush, John Lithgow, Nathaniel Lees, Thomas Sainsbury, Ian Mune, Yvette Parsons, Bruce Phillips, Maaka Pohatu, Irene Wood, George Henare, Holly Shanahan, Paolo Rotondo, Jane Waddell (more)Plots(1)
After Rush, a miserly judge, suffers a stroke in the middle of a court sentencing, his lapsed insurance lands him in a public care facility. Humiliated by his declining health and the condition of his surroundings, he quickly cements himself as the hospital crank. Enter Lithgow, channeling a type of mega-acting villainy that rivals his turns in De Palma’s Raising Cain and the trash action programmer Ricochet, as a fellow patient who carries his beloved puppet, Jenny Pen, atop his hand. By day, he cracks wise with the staff; by night, he terrorizes patients with a litany of degradations that are best left for you to discover on-screen. Will a man of the law be a victim to this degree of insidious gaslighting? See for yourself in this twisty and twisted thriller. (Fantastic Fest)
(more)Reviews (2)
A retirement home horror thriller with no major surprises, it has about the pace and meaning you'd imagine in a retirement home horror thriller. The Rule of Jenny Pen tries to sketch out a few ideas about finding courage and dignity in old age, but doesn't follow through much. Horror-wise, then, the film doesn't work at all, and is utterly dysfunctional in constructing any atmosphere of fear, coming across as perhaps unintentionally ridiculous. In any case, Geoffrey Rush gives another excellent performance as an arrogant judge who finds himself in a wheelchair in a nursing home after suffering a stroke. In contrast, John Lithgow and his psychopathic retired bully are rather Golden Raspberry-worthy and banal as the originator of the film's evil. It has its interesting moments and is worth watching for Rush's performance alone, but as a whole it really comes across as quite impotent.
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An old judge suffers a stroke, after which he is transferred to a private care facility, where one of the clients terrorises the other residents with his therapy doll – and all of them are all too weak or cowardly to stand up to him. There is no way that this simple subject taken from a short story can be sustained over a runtime of 100+ minutes, so the result is a hopelessly monotonous and dull thriller set in a retirement home and filled with apathetic and catatonic characters, which isn’t helped at all by the cadaverous pace, lack of atmosphere and boring directing. There are some hints of motifs – especially the retirement home as a metaphor for the helpless physical vessel in which we find ourselves imprisoned in old age – but almost nothing comes of them. Geoffrey Rush is good in the lead role (the only positive thing in the whole film), but John Lithgow is absolutely horrible as the grotesque psychopathic antagonist.
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