Crew
Director – James Ashcroft, Screenplay – James Ashcroft & Eli Kent, Based on the Short Story The Rule of Jenny Penn by Owen Marshall, Producers – Catherine Fitzgerald & Orlando Stewart, Photography – Matt Henley, Music – John Gibson, Visual Effects Supervisor – Stan Alley, Prosthetics Designer – Don Brooker, Makeup Design – Frankie Karena, Production Design – Zahra Archer Minogue. Production Company – Light in the Dark Productions/Blueskin Films/New Zealand Film Commission.
Cast
Geoffrey Rush (Steffen Mortensen), John Lithgow (Dave Crealy), George Henare (Tony Garfield), Bruce Phillips (Peter Llewyn), Ginette McDonald (Sally Pile), Irene Wood (Olive Shaw), Nathaniel Lees (Sonny Ausage), Ian Mune (Howie Wicker), Yvette Parsons (Carer Tania), Fiona Collins (Carer Grace)
Plot
The judge Steffen Mortensen suffers a stroke and has to be placed in a geriatric care home. There he becomes aware that fellow patient Dave Crealy is attacking and killing the other patients. Despite being confined to a wheelchair and with one side of his face frozen, Steffen tries to stop Crealy.
The Rule of Jenny Pen was the second directorial outing for New Zealander James Ashcroft. Ashcroft had a career as an actor going back to the 1990s, including appearances in a number of Hollywood productions, although no major parts. After directing several short films, Ashcroft’s feature-length debut was with the horror film Coming Home in the Dark (2021). Here he adapts a short story by Owen Marshall, one of New Zealand’s most celebrated living writers – another Marshall story also formed the basis of Coming Home in the Dark.
There have been horror films set in geriatric care homes before – New Zealand director Tony Williams previously made the little-seen Next of Kin (1982), The Manor (2021) and the subsequent The Home (2025). The Rule of Jenny Pen perhaps comes closest to Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), which had an aging Elvis in a retirement home fighting a mummy, but both are wildly different works. There are few films I have ever comes across that depict the horrors of aging as well as this. The film is a snapshot of characters at the ends of their lives and rendered all but helpless – the dementia ridden lady whose children left her there and told her they were coming back; others with addled wits and shut in; Geoffrey Rush struggling to stop a killer while recovering from a stroke.
For a relatively unknown director, James Ashcroft has brought on board some quite high-profile acting talent with the headline names of Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow. And both are on excellent form. Rush seems to have gotten a whole lot older than the time one last saw him anything. It seems barely yesterday when I remember him in Quills (2000) and the Pirates of the Caribbean films where he seemed only around his forties. (In reality, Rush was 73 when he made The Rule of Jenny Pen and is playing around his own age).
John Lithgow, himself aged 74, gives one of the best performances he has in some time. Lithgow is at his best when he gets to play nasty – one of his other finest roles was as a serial killer in the fourth season of tv’s Dexter (2006-13). Here he is venomous and malevolent, layering his role with a contemptuous bite, even bursting into song and dance at one point. The psychological games that go on between the impaired Geoffrey Rush and Lithgow are the backbone of the film. Both actors seem to be having the time of their lives and quite make the film.
(Nominee for Best Actor (John Lithgow) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
Trailer here