Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end. It’s a movie about bullying and elder abuse – more specifically, elder-on-elder abuse – and it is always most chilling when it sticks to the realist constraints of what could actually happen.
The locale is an un-luxurious residential care facility where a retired judge is now astonished to find himself; this is Stefan Mortensen, played by Geoffrey Rush, who succumbed to a catastrophic stroke while passing judgment from the bench. He is a cantankerous and high-handed man, furious to be in this demeaning place and who, like many there, assures himself it isn’t for long. Mortensen has to share a room with Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby star whose career fizzled out. These men are terrorised by long-term patient Dave Crealy, played with true hideousness by John Lithgow, a racist bully who convinces the care staff he is a gentle, harmless soul by exaggerating his mental and physical decay, but tyrannises patients behind officialdom’s back with his therapy hand puppet named Jenny Pen, making the bewildered and terrified patients submit to her “rule”.
This is a film to remind you of the ventriloquist in DC Comics’ Scarface Puppet or the Ealing classic Dead of Night, although Jenny’s dysfunctionally independent existence is an open question. And it reminded me of Patrick Hamilton’s depictions of mean-minded bullying, petty but toxic, among the miserable inmates of boarding houses. The long, insupportable afternoons of boredom stretch ahead in the home’s bland association room, a place whose sheer featureless blankness is shown to encourage mental decay and catatonia; it’s a woozy, timeless non-place in which Crealy appears like a capering, malicious demon with his own secret history in the institution.
You’ll spend the film longing for Stefan and Tony to hit back at the unspeakable Dave, and the question of when and how this happens is a flaw in the film; there’s a kind of finale duplication here. But pure choking horror fills the screen like poison gas. One footnote: therapy hand puppets do indeed exist in the real world and they are not the preserve of psychopaths. Roger Ross Williams’s 2016 documentary Life, Animated tells the uplifting story of a boy with autism who was helped by his Disney-character puppets; maybe it could act as a palate cleanser after this film.
• The Rule of Jenny Pen is in UK and Irish cinemas from 14 March, and on Shudder and AMC+ from 28 March.
