Geoffrey Rush is Stefan Mortensen, a proudly independent judge who suddenly ends up in an assisted living facility after suffering a stroke. The staff encourage the curmudgeon to make friends with the other residents, but he insists he’ll only be there long enough to recover the ability to walk. He thinks of himself as too good for the situation as a way to distance himself from his new reality. Even as others extend an olive branch, he quickly pushes it away.
Enter John Litghow’s character, Dave Crealy, who terrifies the other residents into submission. Despite his advanced age, Dave is a dimwitted bully, forcing his way into the community dance to step on toes and collide with the other residents to ruin their fun. With a clear understanding of the facility’s bureaucracy, he wears the guise of senility so that he can get away with his psychopathic antics. Lithgow has been relishing villain roles for more than forty years and he’s at his nastiest here. It’s as if his mean-spirited character from Cliffhanger entered assisted care.
A permanent fixture of Dave’s wardrobe is his hand puppet, which he named Jenny Pen for reasons unexplained. Whenever he’s feeling especially cruel, he flips the puppet upside down and forces his elderly victims to “lick Jenny’s ass,” or in other words: his wrist. What’s especially effective about Dave’s puppet is the fact it has no eyes; as light shines through the rubber skull, it makes the void beyond Jenny Pen’s eye sockets turn an unsettling shade of pink. Dave and his puppet’s antics are cruel, darkly funny, and terrifying at the same time.
It’s not long before Dave targets the cantankerous judge as he’s the only one of the residents whose will hasn’t been broken. Dave enjoys free range of the coop as no one else will corroborate the judge’s stories in fear of what Jenny Pen will do in retaliation. Worse, the staff believe the judge is suffering from night terrors and possible dementia as his condition worsens; whereas lesser horror movies often go for the “no one believes the main character” angle in the face of logic, this movie goes to lengths to prove Dave is cunning enough to get away with his antics. What unravels is a cat-and-mouse game in which the mouse is confined to a wheelchair.
It’s rare to have performers as great as Rush and Lithgow slumming it up in a genre movie. This isn’t elevated horror and it doesn’t have anything Important to say… in other words, its greatest strength is pure storytelling (which in my opinion is how you make a movie on hard mode). Years ago, I wrote that the reason Child’s Play is such an effective film is because there are few scenarios as unsettling as a mother unknowingly tucking her child in with a serial killer every night. That’s exactly the kind of diabolical writing on display in The Rule of Jenny Pen.
The Goug' Blog 