Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay. Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands of time.
This quote from Shelley, verbalised in THE RULE OF JENNY PEN, resonates throughout the nightmare narrative.
Look on this work by Kiwi filmmaker, James Ashcroft and do not despair that the horror film, in this case the horological horror film, dealing with the lone and level sands of time, is in good hands.
Imagine if you will, Psycho set in an aged care facility. Hitchcock would have hitched his wagon to this one.
Making a welcome return to the screen after an absence of many years, Geoffrey Rush reminds us of how much and such a fine actor he is.
John Lithgow glowers and glows, camps and capers, as a brutal bullying whacko with a glove puppet accomplice, a vile vaudevillian villain complete with a deliciously demented song and dance routine.
THE RULE OF JENNY PEN tells the story of Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), a former judge who suffers a stroke and is confined to a nursing home, where he becomes the target of a manipulative and sinister fellow resident named Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), who uses a seemingly harmless glove puppet fashioned from a plastic baby doll called Jenny Pen to terrorize and control the other residents.
Exploiting his facade of dementia to inflict psychological abuse and torment upon them, Crealy’s sinister focus falls on Stefan, who has twigged to his diabolical duplicity. Stephan has to confront his own powerlessness as well as this insidious inmate as his accusations are put down to his own brain fogged condition.
THE RULE OF JENNY PEN is a true horror film in that the monsters are flesh and blood humans in a situation that many of us will have to face – illness, incapacitation, isolation in a vulnerable environment.
Based on Own Marshall’s short story, THE RULE OF JENNY PEN is a genuinely creepy cuckoo nest experience.
