The Rule of Jenny Penn(2025)(Review)

Ageism has had a weird place in horror for forever. Typically, it relies on a fear of the elderly bodies and usually incorporates nudity to shock the audience. But what happens when the horror is approached from within the elderly, rather than from the tropes? Well, today we are approaching the newly released film, ‘The Rule of Jenny Penn’.

Stefan Mortensen (played by Geoffrey Rush) is an elderly judge who has a massive stroke while reading a court’s ruling during a case. When he awakes, he has mild paralysis of part of his body and is placed in a nursing home/assisted living facility to recuperate under the right care. He’s miserable of course, having lived a lonely yet successful life, so not having complete agency over himself and his routine is enough to drive him mad.
However, there’s also a long-living resident named Dave Crealy (played by a terrific John Lithgow) who shows up in the middle of the night to psychologically bully him. He has a baby-doll that he wears as a puppet, named Jenny Penn, who he constantly talks to (and through) who basically is the top-dog of the home.

As Stefan struggles to adjust to assisted living, and having a roommate he doesn’t relate with, and becomes targeted by Dave, his pleads for help from the orderlies go ignored and over-ruled. And since he can’t find help from those meant to help him, his condition worsens over time and Dave’s bullying only gets stranger and more dangerous. And as his condition worsens, we the viewers even start to suspect if this is really all happening or if we are just enduring a gestation of dementia.

This movie is tense from start to end. It’s hard to predict where exactly things are going to go, and all you know is that things certainly won’t be easy or comfortable. Watching seniors have to obey Jenny Penn’s bizarre requests, be bullied and tortured, and fight with each other is enough to make you squirm, but the director pushes things into even further territories where you just want to scream and shake the screen.

While not being outright horror, it’s still a scary experience. Speaking as someone who once worked in an assisted living facility, this movie drove me mad with the trauma I endured while working there, and also with how the facility itself functioned. The orderlies here are useless, the residents are not properly protected or supervised, and there’s so many other things that just made me feel ill.

John Lithgow is incredible in this role, playing a sadistic senior who knows how to work the system around him, and Geoffrey Rush is a fantastic protagonist that is simultaneously hard to root for but you also really want him to get out of the situations he ends up in. The camerawork, strange imagery that occurs, and intense sound design really make you feel helpless and almost like an actual experience of what it must feel like to be there.
It’s bonkers, grounded, and skin-crawling, without going too far into a territory that would alienate it’s target audience. Definitely a high recommendation from myself.

4/5
“The Rule of Jenny Penn” is currently streaming on Shudder.

‘Til Next Time,
Mike Cleopatra