There’s an inherent creepiness to care homes, and not just because of the elderly residents’ natural proximity to death. Death is certainly a part of it, but there’s also a sense of artifice, a feeling of reaching for something cozy and homelike while never quite achieving it, that can be both off-putting and unintentionally cynical. In filmmaker James Ashcroft’s The Rule Of Jenny Pen, a horror unfolding almost entirely in a care home, these elements are on full display, but augmented with another, crucial element to what makes these places unsettling. In Jenny Pen, the care home’s status as a social microcosm, a universe unto itself, is key to its horror, and to its success as a squirmy, paranoid psychological chiller. Of course, having Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow along for the ride certainly doesn’t hurt.
Rush plays Stefan, a respected New Zealand judge sent to a care home after a stroke leaves half his body largely paralyzed. Though he’s in a wheelchair most of the time, Stefan has lost none of his judgmental temperament when it comes to the home’s staff and fellow residents, and he’s particularly put off by the antics of Dave (Lithgow), an eccentric known for carrying around an eyeless baby doll hand puppet he’s named Jenny Pen.
At first, Dave and Jenny are just another annoyance for Stefan, who spends his time complaining about his lack of a private room and generally sneering at the company he’s forced to keep. The more he watches, though, the more Stefan realizes there’s something very wrong with Dave and Jenny, no matter how many times the care home staff write off his observations as side effects of his stroke.
To be clear, ambiguity is not something The Rule Of Jenny Pen is aiming for, to its tremendous benefit. The audience is not asked to consider whether or not Stefan is seeing things, or losing touch with reality. Instead, Ashcroft—who adapted Owen Marshall’s short story with co-writer Eli Kent—plunges the film into two worlds within the labyrinthine, shadowy facility. There’s the world of daylight, when illnesses and group activities and listless lunches are the norm, and the world of night, when Dave roams around like he owns the place, Jenny on his hand, tormenting residents as he sees fit.
Both worlds are depicted with unnerving clarity. Halls seem to stretch forever, light fixtures never seem to glow bright enough, and aging carpets’ faux-cheeriness is rapidly fading. Together, Ashcroft and cinematographer Matt Henley build an entire world within these confining walls, then often deliberately skew it. When Stefan is in bed, for example, he’s almost never framed in a direct, symmetrical view. The camera slips to one side or another, capturing part of his face, half his body, a glimpse of his roommate’s bed. As The Rule Of Jenny Pen goes on, this technique spreads to the entire home, as Ashcroft and Henley deliver chilling shots of slow-motion dancing, sequences of violence that unfold across a series of obscured views, and liminal images of the home’s empty rooms that hint at impossible geography. The place could be going on forever. It could be a kind of hell. Like Stefan, the audience is asked to reach for the complete picture, one always maddeningly just out of reach.
This sensation of being inches from the truth but unable to grasp it extends to the film’s characterization, and to Rush and Lithgow’s performances. Stefan is, professionally and personally, a man used to rigid views of right and wrong, dark and light, sanity and insanity. But his rigidity is slipping alongside his body, and the film’s exquisite sound design and worldbuilding emphasize this. Rush—a steady, capable presence in pretty much any genre—leans into the frustration that comes from having a sharp mind and a declining body, delivering one of his finest performances in recent memory as Stefan struggles mightily to reach some kind of clarity. The Rule Of Jenny Pen‘s willingness to constantly challenge its audience with shadows and hints rather than some kind of outright horror mythos is one of its great strengths, and Rush embodies that with intense, compelling control.
But even Rush’s considerable powers cannot shine as bright as Lithgow. Always a versatile force in genre cinema, Lithgow marshals all the power he brought to Brian De Palma thrillers like Raising Cain to deliver an absolute stunner of a performance. It certainly helps that he has one of the world’s creepiest puppets—the ability to filter eerie light through Jenny’s rubbery head and hollow eyes is one of the film’s great horror touches—right there on his hand, but Lithgow himself is the real star. There are moments he shifts, with stunning focus, from madcap sneering and dancing to glances as cold as glaciers in the span of seconds, cementing Dave and Jenny as one of the great villain teams in 21st century horror. There are lots of other reasons The Rule Of Jenny Pen works, but they’d all fall away without Lithgow.
The dueling performances of Lithgow and Rush, bolstered by a craft team that pours everything they have into the unsettling atmosphere, make The Rule Of Jenny Pen into solid horror, but there are still times when the cracks show. The film works best when it’s leaning hard into the hagsploitation roots of its story, allowing the performances to carry the action and wrenching the discomfort into its viewers’ skulls, but there are times when Jenny Pen sets that instinct aside. When that happens, and the film starts to feel a bit more like a tone poem than a narrative, it falters.
These moments aside, The Rule Of Jenny Pen is a creepy puppet movie that’s also a meditation on aging, death, and the fear that comes from losing control of your body, and thus your own agency. It’s one of the creepiest, smartest horror films so far this year, and one won’t soon forget Jenny Pen’s haunting, hollow eyes.
Director: James Ashcroft
Writer: James Ashcroft, Eli Kent
Starring: John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare
Release Date: March 7, 2025
