John Lithgow and His Hellish Hand Puppet Torment the Elderly in 'The Rule of Jenny Pen'

Getting older sucks. Things inside of you that were once working so well you didn’t even know they existed suddenly spring apart with a b-oing-oing sound like one of Wile E. Coyote’s faulty mechanisms. Aging might be natural, but it is also absurd, a parade of microscopic indignities, your body and mind calling default on all the loans your younger self took out unawares. The Rule of Jenny Pen, a squeaky-wheeled nursing home nightmare starring Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow as elderly antagonists duking it out among the Depends set, nails the absurdity of infirmity—it’s rather bleak to call a comedy but laugh you shall, in knowing terror if nothing else. There is little dignity in the indignity of decay.

Co-written and directed by New Zealander James Ashcroft—who previously gave us the extremely unsettling Coming Home in the Dark—the outlandishness of the geriatric in The Rule of Jenny Pen has a face. A literal face. An eyeless infant face. “Jenny Pen” is the name given to a dilapidated babydoll hand puppet that the sadistic Dave Crealy (Lithgow) lugs around serving him two purposes—one, Jenny makes the faculty think he’s more senile than he is, keeping them off his scent. And two—that scent is he’s a tyrant who wanders the living facility at night using the doll to abuse all of the other patients in a myriad of deeply, profoundly effed up ways. (If you’ve never given much thought to a doll’s asshole before, I find myself in the somewhat distressed position now jealous of your innocence.)

The staff (who all turn out to be egregiously ineffectual, and that’s at best) regard Dave as a harmless catatonic fiddling with his dementia doll all day. But everyone else lives in a constant state of dread of him and his eyeless little friend’s reign of terror, haunting the hallways every night as the fear of infantilization turned flesh (née plastic). Never has Lithgow’s six-foot-four-inches seemed more imposing, looming over all the feeble others trapped in their beds, in their minds, all tangled in cords and unable to fight back against the giddy dancing despot with his miniature sidekick. It’s a sick-making power imbalance of a bully unleashed upon the meekest, all while his perverse control over everyone totally gets him off. (Lithgow, it must be said, appears to be having the time of his life.)

Until the honorable judge Stefan Mortensen (Rush) shows up anyway. A bitter pill before his stroke—we first meet him nastily castigating a mother in court for not better protecting her children from their abusive father—he’s an even more unpleasant piece of work after his brain goes pop. Furious at his mind and body’s betrayal and convinced he’ll get better if all of these assholes pretending to help would just leave him be, Stefan immediately manages to get himself on everybody’s bad side. Which makes him the perfect target for Dave—as lousy as all of the employees are under typical circumstances, ain’t nobody going out of their way for this ripe old curmudgeon.

Stefan, though confined to a wheelchair and increasingly paralyzed by his steadily worsening illness, though he may be, isn’t going to get pushed around so easily. His Maori roommate, a friendly former football player named Tony (George Henare), desperately recommends not fighting back—that it will only make things worse. And sure enough Dave’s worst retorts to Stefan’s resilience are saved to be heaped on Tony—racist jabs and Jenny Pen’s violent molestations are just the start of it.

It’s not at all easy to watch at times (and I imagine for anyone with a relative of their own in outside care, it’ll prove doubly tough), but that little dolly and the blackly comic surrealism she instills into the picture manages to keep things just on the right side of over-heightened. As do the spit-flecked performances from the film’s two very-game leading men, who savor every last drop of their character’s ugliness. Before projectiling it into the other’s face, of course.

The Rule of Jenny Pen does for assisted living what Buffy the Vampire Slayer did for high school—it makes goofy metaphor of our fears, with the loss of self-volition that looms ahead for all of us given a wacky demonic form. One that’s really just a front for the very real human horror lurking underneath. The fist up its trousers, if you will. Jenny Pen might be the grinning devil in our face, but it’s always a spoil of pathetic piping down under there—heaving, disgruntled, lame, the man behind the curtain always turns out to be a poof of smoke that we’ll all nevertheless, despite our decencies and best intentions, end up choking to death on. As, like, a communal thing. (And yes the parallels to real life—to our current political situations—are very there, but let’s leave them outside for today.)