The Rule of Jenny Pen: John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush star in 'pure choking horror'

Yahoo

25-03-2025

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This "care-home thriller" from the New Zealand director James Ashcroft is an unusual affair, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph.
Ten minutes into the film, a judge, Stefan (Geoffrey Rush), suffers a stroke mid-trial and is confined to a nursing facility, where he almost immediately sees a patient accidentally incinerate himself. It sets the tone for what follows: it turns out that patients at the home are being terrorised behind the staff's back by one of its long-term residents, a "sadistic maniac" called Dave (John Lithgow). Bearing a therapeutic hand puppet he calls "Jenny Pen", its eyes plucked out "for added menace", he creeps into his fellow patients' rooms at night and forces them "to pay obeisance to her in the most demeaning ways". It's a terrific premise – and to an extent a plausible one – but the film falls flat, owing largely to a "leaky script" that drains it of the necessary suspense.
Of course, the upright Stefan and the deranged Dave clash, said Nick Howells in The London Standard. As a result, their final showdown doesn't come as much of a shock. Still, the "sadistic relish with which we get there" is worth the ticket price, as are the two star turns: Lithgow is "balls-to-the-wall bonkers" as Dave, while Rush plays the arrogant retired judge with "erudite gravitas".
The film is reminiscent of the ventriloquist section in the classic 1940s horror "Dead of Night", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian; it also reminded me of Patrick Hamilton's depictions of toxic pettiness and bullying in grim boarding houses: the intolerable boredom of afternoons in the "featureless blankness" of the facility's association room "is shown to encourage mental decay and catatonia". The film's denouement is flawed, but "pure choking horror fills the screen like poison gas".