In the Flesh: The Rule of Jenny Pen

There isn’t much good horror about nursing homes. The subject is so taboo, especially among Americans, so freighted with guilt over the abandonment of aging and infirm parents to a hostile system, that we hardly talk about it outside of hushed confessions to our nearest and dearest. Working from a short story by author Owen Marshall, director James Ashcroft plunges headlong into the dehumanizing despair of institutional living, its similarities to imprisonment, and the class, disability, and racial dynamics at play among the elderly. It’s an ambitious bite to take out of a largely unexplored subgenre, but Ashcroft manages it deftly. Take sadistic nursing home bully Dave Crealy’s (John Lithgow) braying, moronic laughter as he tells a racist joke, playing up his own oafish bigotry before just a few scenes later revealing a much deeper capacity for self-knowledge and insight. As the old and much-abused saw goes, the cruelty is the point. He indulges in his bigoted antics not because he’s incapable of understanding himself or others, but because it delights him to torture other people, and the marginalized are easy targets.

Nobody feels like a stereotype here, not prickly, furious Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), not his grudging ally and hard-won friend, retired rugby player Tony Garfield (George Henare), and not Crealy himself, who Lithgow plays as a giggling schoolyard thug obsessed with power for its own sake. The sequences in which he forces fellow residents to kiss the “asshole” of his babydoll puppet, the titular Jenny Pen, are as squalid and childishly horrible as anything of the kind I’ve seen before. Through his physical strength and relatively intact mind, Crealy has a whole facility at his mercy, and the only thing he can think to do with all that power is to make them lick up imaginary shit. It’s the indignity capping all others, worse than Mortensen’s loss of control over his own body after suffering a series of strokes, worse than the dismissal of his reasoned and articulate arguments by condescending nursing home staff. To be at the mercy not just of old age and disease, but of a tyrannical idiot intent on making everything worse, is beyond the limits of endurance. Just ask anyone in America.

Quietly and confidently shot with the occasional touch of dazzling green thrown against institutional grays and whites and beiges (the shot of a resident lying dead in a pond at the edge of the woods is a beautiful little production), The Rule of Jenny Pen takes its subject and its characters seriously. It never leans on elderly bodies for horror, never takes cheap or easy routes to building its atmosphere of furious, frustrated dread. The scene in which Tony, who is of Maori descent, attempts to perform the Haka in defiance of Crealy only to succumb to his own infirmity and shortness of breath is deeply affecting, communicating the power still alive in Tony’s broken body and his intense frustration and grief at having become unable to express it fully. It’s a moment which finds painful thematic catharsis in the film’s final suspense sequence, in which Tony and Mortensen band together to murder Crealy in a linen closet before collapsing in tears in one another’s arms. Justice still matters at the edge of mortality. Joy and freedom still matter to the disabled and the unwell.