James Ashcroft’s 2021 debut feature, Coming Home in the Dark, was a deeply disturbing exploration of how the powerful wield their authority over others and the dramatic fallout that can occur when victims decide to strike back. It’s a violent movie that treads emotionally volatile territory, where victims of abuse feel justified in visiting brutal revenge upon their former tormentors. But it is also about institutional violence, and the gears of bureaucracy that allow atrocities to occur in the first place, then cover things up to protect the perpetrators. The Rule of Jenny Pen tills similar ground, at least inasmuch as it is about domination and subjugation, but with a more ambivalent tone and, ultimately, more mixed results.
Ashcroft’s latest is ostensibly a horror film set in the confines of an assisted living home for the elderly and impaired, but it flits uncomfortably between neck-straining gawking, pitch-black humor, and intense, nerve-wracking abuse. As the film begins, Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush) is passing down sentencing on a sexual predator and also admonishing the victim’s mother for not identifying the abuse earlier. He has a sudden stroke, and is soon deposited at a New Zealand care home, confined to a wheelchair and with minimal use of his faculties. A proud, even haughty man, Mortensen has no interest in learning about his fellow care home denizens, nor is he keen to humor the staff. He is convinced that as soon as his condition improves, he will be back home and even back on the bench. But then he encounters Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), a quiet, lumbering man who skulks the halls wearing the titular therapy puppet on his hand. It’s odd, but Mortensen pays it no mind until one evening when Crealy enters his shared room and begins terrorizing Mortensen’s roommate, Tony (George Henare). With more mobility than most of the other residents, Crealy has turned the home into his own little fiefdom, demanding that people pledge fealty to Jenny Pen and “lick her asshole,” which involves Crealy presenting his wrist to someone and having them lick it. Mortensen can’t believe what he’s seeing, and refuses to indulge Crealy’s unhinged fantasy. And so, a battle of wills results, with Mortensen gradually realizing that his former stature cannot protect him from someone like Crealy.
It’s a sturdy setup for a psychological thriller, a sort of cat-and-mouse game between two men struggling for control. But Ashcroft and co-writer Eli Kent, working from Owen Marshall’s short story, can’t settle on a consistent tone. On its face, it’s an absurd situation, and at points the filmmakers play it for dark comedy. Moments after arriving at the facility, Mortensen watches another patient accidentally self-immolate himself, a shocking bit of business that happens so quickly, and ends so abruptly, that one might mistake it for a jump-scare dream sequence. The various nurses and attendants are barely characters, sketched in more as antagonists to Mortenson than functional human beings (indeed, Crealy’s ability to wander the halls unnoticed strains credulity). And then there are occasional bits of wild expressionism where Mortenson imagines the puppet’s head as a giant, looming object that emerges from behind Crealy. Lithgow, for his part, has played over-the-top villains in the past, most notably in De Palma’s Raising Cain and action classics Cliffhanger and Ricochet, and he’s suitably demonic here, aided immeasurably by creepy discolored contact lenses and a set of fake teeth. But the gallows humor turns sour when Crealy reveals a deep-seated racism towards Tony, who is Māori, and eventually sexually assaults a female patient. It’s a matter of the cartoonish brushing up against the abject, and while that tension could conceivably lead to something fascinating, here it is mostly ugly and off-putting. Ashcroft has a great eye for composition and mood; in daylight, the home is clean and sterile, neatly arranged; at night, the hallways and doorways become ominous, deep recesses of shadow that mask the comings and goings of the malevolent Crealy. The result of these at-odds elements is an intermittently compelling film, but ultimately the Haneke-esque exploration of violence and subjugation simply does not fit well with the cheeky genre thrills. The Rule of Jenny Pen is an ambitious miss, but a miss nonetheless.
DIRECTOR: James Ashcroft; CAST: John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, Nathaniel Lees, George Henare; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: March 7; STREAMING: March 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.
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