★★★★ - THE POST
- Lithgow hits such heights of camp villainy you'll be flashing on Jack Nicholson in The Shining -
Judge Stefan Mortensen has suffered a stroke. One side of his body has died on the vine and Mortensen can no longer look after himself. After a lifetime on a judge's salary and with, presumably, the gold plated pension that goes with it, you might have expected Mortensen to have moved into some private hospital with the best care money could buy.
But, as Mortensen explains to a chain-smoking and flask-swilling bloke called Wicker, early on in The Rule of Jenny Pen, there is a chronic shortage of hospital beds for long-term stays in New Zealand. And so Mortensen has been put into the Royal Pine Mews Care Home, which, as Wicker so eloquently puts it, is a dump.
Royal Pine is on the outskirts of an unnamed city, but it seems to exist in a place where time has mostly stopped moving.
The nurse who checks Mortensen in has a modern computer, and there is a flat-screen TV on the wall. But when we hear that TV playing, it is a clip from the 1970s gameshow It's In The Bag. Likewise the floral carpets, wood veneer doors and the faded cream paint on the walls of the residents' common-room. All of these things could have been here for 50 years.
Or, are we just seeing the world through Mortensen's eyes? And is Mortensen - with his stroke-ravaged brain - any sort of reliable witness?
The only person who might know for sure is a bloke named Dave Crealy. And Crealy most definitely has been lurking around Royal Pine for decades. There are photos on the walls that show Crealy as a young man, working as a caretaker at the home. But now Crealy is a resident. And, after a lifetime of feeling powerless and belittled by the world, Crealy has got Royal Pine under his thumb.
The nursing staff only see Crealy as a harmless old coot, who keeps to himself and doesn't have much idea of what's happening around him.
But by night, Crealy, with his set of caretaker's keys and all his faculties miraculously intact, is free to enact a reign of terror on his hapless and helpless neighbours. And new-boy Mortensen is firmly in his sights.
The Rule of Jenny Pen is a second adaptation by director James Ashcroft and writer Eli Kent, of a short-story by Owen Marshall.
The first, Coming Home in the Dark, was a bluntly traumatising thriller that took care to flesh out a horribly credible backstory for its killers, that involved torture and abuse while they were residents at a home for boys.
Jenny Pen is working in similar territory, with Crealy revelling in his power over Mortensen and the others, because he was powerless himself, a long time ago.
But Jenny Pen, although it all takes place within the rooms and grounds of the home, is a more complex film than Coming Home in the Dark.
On one level, Jenny Pen is a thriller about two men - Mortensen and his room-mate Tony Garfield - teaming up to fight against Crealy's bastardry. But Mortensen has his own complicated history of bullying and cruelty. And there are events shown here that might be happening only within Mortensen's mind, as he slides in and out of delusion, memory and nightmare.
Getting all that to stay knitted together and coherent on the screen is a tough job, but Ashcroft and his crew mostly succeed. There are few lumps and bumps in the narrative, as we shift from darkly funny drama into the psychological horror that is threaded through Jenny Pen.
But no matter where we are, the quality of the writing and film-making keep us inside the story. Matt Henley's cinematography and John Gibson's score are as good as any you will see or hear this year.
In the leads, Ashcroft has the immense wattage of Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow to work with. With a couple of less-well-known actors, The Rule of Jenny Pen would still have been a bloody good film. But Rush and Lithgow are titans for a reason, and they both leave it all on the field.
Lithgow, in particular, pitches Crealy pretty high from the beginning, but as we enter the final scenes of Jenny Pen, Lithgow hits such heights of camp villainy you'll be flashing on Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and kind of wishing Ashcroft had just handed his star an axe and pointed him at the nearest wooden door.
Around Rush and Lithgow, George Henare is superb as Mortensen's only friend and ally, Holly Shanahan is great as the dubious nurse in charge of Mortensen, and Ian Mune is happily incendiary as the short-lived Wicker.
I walked into The Rule of Jenny Pen expecting a straight-ahead thriller and horror. Walking home afterwards, I realised it had made me think about everything from The Shining, as mentioned, to Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals and Dario Argento's 1977 Suspiria. Which is some dizzying company to keep.
The Rule of Jenny Pen won't delight everyone, and that's fine. But I’d rather watch a film any day that tried to do something hellaciously ambitious, and mostly made it work, over a film that aimed only for the predictable, and achieved it. Bravo.
The Rule of Jenny Pen is playing in cinemas now. And that is where it needs to be seen.
- Graeme Tuckett, THE POST
The Rule of Jenny Pen now playing at Light House Cinema!