Horror films are often about old age without being explicit about it. Think of all those shuffling zombies. The Rule of Jenny Pen cuts right to the chase to tell a story about nasty goings-on in a care home, where tangential horror occurs but the care home itself is the real concern of co-writer/director James Ashcroft. It’s a punchy and effective 100 minutes or so. Stephen King is a fan (“one of the best movies I’ve seen this year”). Maybe you should be too.
Ashcroft starts with a joke. The actor Geoffrey Rush, five years absent from our screens thanks to legal wrangles, playing a judge. A New Zealand judge struck down by a stroke midway through handing out a judgement. Stefan Mortensen (Rush) winds up in a crappy care home, lots of floral carpet, because thanks to bad investments he has no money. So he’s forced to slum it, which he does with extreme bad grace.
Stefan clearly thinks that thanks to his status outside he’s going to be a somebody inside. But he hasn’t reckoned on Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), another oldie and long-term resident. By day Dave is to all intents and purposes just another bewildered senior, hugging his child’s glove puppet Jenny Pen to his immobile body while staring at an invisible horizon. But by night he terrorises the fellow inmates – scampering about the dark corridors stealing false teeth, grabbing men by the nuts, eating other patients’ little treats, a nighttime lord of misrule.
The storytelling rubber hits the road when Stefan starts vocally objecting to the care home staff about Dave’s terrorising of his room-mate, Tony, a former New Zealand rugby international – again, how the mighty are fallen – and Dave turns his attention to Stefan.
Ashcroft has two stories to tell. Dave and his malevolent doll’s reign of terror on the one hand and the indignity of final days lived out in a care home on the other. In the one strand Dave pours someone else’s piss over Stefan while he sleeps – see, incontinence! In the other a tour of all the generalised bland awfulnesses of the care home, the flatlining before the ultimate flatlining. A well-meaning entertainer tries to get a group singalong going. Withered legs at the oldie disco shuffling to the John Rowles song If I Only Had Time (ha ha). A hunched pensioner sitting naked in a chair in a bathroom while a care worker plays a hose over skin hanging in folds.
Ashcroft and his DP Matt Henley don’t want us to feel cosy. Often shooting on wide lenses with minimal lighting, they give the care home a flat alien look. There’s a bleakness to the surroundings that matches the prognosis for the residents. There are cutaways to the blank faces of the residents. All that soft furnishing, all that pappy food.
Imagine being George Henare, who plays Tony, caught between Rush and Lithgow, two titans of scene-stealing. Lithgow gambolling about like a demented witch doctor while Rush delivers displays of thwarted lordliness (Stefan is a hard man to like). But Henare does OK and in fact increasingly comes into his own as Tony becomes the plot pivot – why does a once-tough old bruiser put up with this treatment, and is he going to continue putting up with it?
More generally, Ashcroft niggles away at the question of why people put up with tyrants. He also indulges himself towards the end with dream sequences and the like, time-wasting if you’re not on board with it. And I’m not entirely convinced by the decision to go into ancient history to explain Dave’s awfulness. It does make for a more humane film, but it slightly dampens the horror. But Stephen King is right, it is a good movie, another one in the bag for Shudder’s clever buyers. And how good to see Rush again!
The Rule of Jenny Pen – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
