"The Rule of Jenny Pen" Movie Review

What makes a movie scary?  Ghosts?  Monsters?  Another Fast & Furious movie?  Sometimes all you need is to see “A24” or “Blumhouse Pictures” or even just “Based on a Stephen King Story”.  What makes a move crazy scary and creepy?  It’s seeing the trailer for the first time less than a week before its release.  It’s having that movie come out with a crazy, creepy title.  And it’s having the movie start two mainstream actors with several Emmy and Oscar award nominations between them and thinking to yourself, “What are they doing in a movie like this?”  And then, as the icing on the cake, the movie actually lives up to everything you’ve been prepared for, and it truly is crazy, scary, creepy.  That’s a good film and that makes for a good night at the movies.

What is the rule of Jenny Pen?  I still don’t know.  It could be accepting her in all her creepiness and admitting that, “She rules the world” and it could be accepting your own fate and licking her proverbial ass.  But be sure about this, whatever the hell that rule may be, Jenny Pen rules it for sure.

Geoffrey Rush stars as Stefan Mortensen, a nerdy, well-educated, angry, lonely, and crusty old man nearing the end of a long career as a judge.  During what comes to be his last case where just after he berates a man for multiple child molestations, he turns to the mother and rips her a new one because of what he determines to have been her fault, he starts to stutter and mutter and eventually passes out from what we later come to find out to have been a career-ending stroke.  Stefan wakes up in a bottom-of-the-barrel senior living convalescent home where he is surrounded by dozens of other “lesser-thans”, most of whom are demented or decrepit in some way or another.  He’s more miserable than ever, he scolds his caregivers without a thought and he pulls no punches about how he’s better than his current surroundings.  That is, until he gets the attention of Lithgow’s Dave Crealy, another patient who at first glance appears to be irrational and well-placed but eventually shows signs that he’s more alert and aware than anyone else and is using his fellow cuckoo’s nest inmates as pawns in his evil and deadly pranks.

After much consternation Stefan eventually cracks and befriends his roommate who need to team up to fight and make every effort to overcome Crealy and his wicked ways.  The movie gets creepier as it plays out.

To say any more would be to say too much.  All that’s left is to say is that the movie D E L I V E R S.  You’ve likely never heard of The Rule of Jenny Pen until this review but now that you know of it’s existence, do yourself a favor and go get creeped out by some good writing and standout performances in a movie the likes of which you’ve never seen.

- Paul Rosen