The Rule of Jenny Pen Review (2025)

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The Rule of Jenny Pen
The Rule of Jenny Pen is a psychological horror film directed by James Ashcroft, and the cast includes John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Ian Mune, Thomas Sainbury, Maaka Pohatu.

My Thoughts on The Rule of Jenny Pen

There’s something uniquely haunting about The Rule of Jenny Pen. It’s not just the story or the characters, it’s the feeling it leaves behind, a slow, creeping dread that builds not through spectacle, but through patience, silence, and claustrophobia. 

What begins as a seemingly quiet drama in a rest home evolves into something more disturbing, personal, and unsettling.

The theme of vulnerability runs throughout The Rule of Jenny Pen. Our main character, Stefan Mortensen, is recovering from a stroke, but more importantly, emotional and existential vulnerability.

Geoffrey Rush plays Stefan with a kind of fragility that’s both heartbreaking and quietly powerful. He doesn’t rely on big monologues or dramatic reveals, but instead, his performance lives in his silences, and in the way he shrinks inside himself as the environment around him becomes less safe and more surreal.

John Lithgow’s Dave Crealy, by contrast, is all presence. He fills every inch of the room with his unpredictability, and there’s an unnerving charm to him, the kind that makes you smile one second and brace yourself the next. 

His relationship with the puppet, Jenny Pen, is one of the film’s most unsettling devices. It begins almost comically, a grown man in a care facility whispering secrets to a doll, but the longer it goes on, the more we realize how much control Dave exerts over the others through this puppet. Lithgow never overplays it, and his madness is precise, calm, and self-assured.

The setting, a rest home that feels more like a forgotten institution, where the walls are sterile, and the hallways too quiet. It’s a place designed for safety, but it’s also a place people go to disappear, and there’s a deep sadness running beneath everything, a kind of decay, not just of the body, but of dignity, autonomy, and memory.

The Rule of Jenny Penn

When the camera lingers, it waits, and it invites us to sit in discomfort. Much of the unease comes not from what we see, but from what we’re made to feel in those quiet spaces where nothing is apparently happening. 

The sound design is similarly restrained. Moments of stillness are interrupted by voices, by movements, by that eerie voice Lithgow gives to Jenny Pen. It's not stylized horror,it's psychological violation, presented through restraint rather than excess.

If the film falters anywhere, it’s in its pacing and some of the supporting characters. At times, the script drifts into repetition, particularly in the third act, and while some characters are clearly present to support the core drama between Stefan and Dave, but their stories are underdeveloped, and their presence begins to feel like filler. 

That said, none of this seriously undermines what the film is trying to achieve. Because ultimately, The Rule of Jenny Pen isn’t just about fear. It’s about the terror of helplessness, of being trapped in a place that’s supposed to care for you, while something unexplainable and cruel plays out behind closed doors.

It’s about what happens when your body betrays you, and the people around you start treating you like you’ve disappeared, and director Ashcroft doesn’t just direct this story, he orchestrates it. It’s not a film that screams to be seen. It whispers, and that whisper, somehow, is louder than most screams.

The Rule of Jenny Pen is definitely worth a stream if you like your horror psychologically terrifying, with plenty of atmosphere.