I Finished The Rule of Jenny Pen So You Don’t Have To

a quick horror movie review

Imagine Grey's Anatomy  if it were written and directed by John Waters at his drunkest, crudest, and most long-winded. Add a deranged John Lithgow singing in a hospital gown, hours of elder abuse, and a loose metaphor for settler colonialism and you've got The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024). 

At its most literal, Jenny Pen is about a retired judge (Geoffrey Rush)  recovering from a stroke who is tormented by a psychopathic patient (Lithgow) wielding a hand puppet named Jenny. From start to finish it is only 1 hr 43 min, but it feels longer. A lot longer.

Critic, Katie Rife, blames the film's tediousness on tonal incongruity but she finds some merit in its offering as "hagsploitation" for men, though it lacks the feminist bent and gothic glamor that give the greatest hag films their teeth. If you can survive the tonal whiplash and the ceaseless cartoon violence, however, there is an allegorical dimension to the narrative: the law’s complicity in the violence it pretends to contain.

The Jenny puppet acts as a stand-in for the bureaucratic mechanisms systems of authority use to outsource cruelty. Dictators don’t get their hands dirty;  they use institutions, enforcers, and puppets. The judge (representing colonial law) is incapacitated, stripped of dignity, and made to endure a system he once upheld. His only ally? A Māori man (George Henare) similarly brutalized by the same regime. Together, they rise in revolution and revenge. 

This film is difficult to recommend. It’s tedious. It’s brutal. There are no women. No queer subtext. And while the actors are top notch, the characters are so grotesque, they're nearly unwatchable. The only real beauty is in the film's cinematography, which is wasted on the sterile beige interiors of a dreary old folks home. But it is not totally devoid of meaning. It facilitates a confrontation with the violence and medical gaslighting baked into institutional care, into aging, and into legal systems designed to protect power rather than people.

I’m not sure who this movie is for. But if you make it to the end, and then sit with it, The Rule of Jenny Pen might leave you with something worth unpacking: the haunting realization that the law, like the puppet, is only ever as benevolent as the hand that controls it.