The Rule of Jenny Pen: A terrifyingly sadistic John Lithgow lifts this flimsy care-home horror

Telegraph

14-03-2025

Care-home thriller The Rule of Jenny Pen has eccentricity motoring it along, certainly to a degree few horror films do. You're in oddball territory when a hospice resident accidentally incinerates himself 10 minutes in, barely making a shred of difference to the story. It's just 'bad luck for that fellow', and we move on.
In time, less random events will befall the clients at this New Zealand facility, 'Royal Pine Mews': their treatment starts to conform to a pattern of psychological torture. The latest person to be admitted, a fulminating ex-judge played by Geoffrey Rush, comes to realise there is a sadistic maniac lurking in plain sight, who is grotesquely abusing his fellow patients without the staff having a clue.
This is Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), a wild-haired nightmare whom the film doesn't over-explain. Like Annie Wilkes from Misery, he's an irrational human monster, but purely vindictive in his agenda. He uses a hand puppet as a therapeutic tool, which is a vicious-looking doll named Jenny Pen. Having plucked out her eyes for added menace, Dave creeps into neighbours' rooms in the night, forcing them to pay obeisance to her in the most demeaning ways.
The deaf ears of the supposed carers ought to make this a horribly believable scenario, but it's too flimsily rendered. The point of view drifts idly back and forth, with jumps in time and/or logic when Rush's Stefan – an almost needlessly unsympathetic hero, and poor company – keeps undergoing strokes and ranting belligerently at the orderlies. It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.
Director James Ashcroft, who made the beyond-bleak survival horror Coming Home in the Dark (2021), summons bad vibes that are more dispiriting than frightening, making choices that gradually erode your patience. But he does have Lithgow, who hasn't played a psychopath with such wicked relish since Brian De Palma's Raising Cain (1992).
Dave's assaults on Stefan's terrified roommate (George Henare) have a hideous, feral glee that once or twice turns the film on its head: becoming Dave would be even more ghastly a fate, we reckon, than running foul of him. A more interesting film might have burrowed right down into that idea, instead of just routinely scanning the Royal Pine Mews day room for its aura of decrepitude. You may be tempted to curtail your visit.