2025 has been just an outstanding year for horror geeks. Granted, the entire genre has been on a resurgence for the last decade, thanks to mid-2010s hits like It Follows and The Babadook that saved the realm from found-footage purgatory. However, this year has been especially kind to horror devotees thanks to outstanding movies like Sinners, Weapons, and The Ugly Stepsister, not to mention other gems like 28 Years Later, The Monkey, and Final Destination Bloodlines. Best of all, the visual and atmospheric impulses of these titles have been wildly varying, in the process providing a striking reflection of how horror’s endless creative possibilities.
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Still, no year of horror cinema is devoid of misfires and 2025 is no exception. In particular, one acclaimed 2025 horror film stands out to me personally as the year’s most overrated horror title. Despite receiving high praise from the likes of Stephen King, The Rule of Jenny Pen just didn’t hit the spine-tingling spot for yours truly.
What Is The Rule of Jenny Pen?
Based on the Owen Marshall short story of the same name, writer/director James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen follows elderly judge, Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), recovering in a care home after a debilitating stroke. This grouchy, abrasive fellow quickly discovers the resident who quietly runs this facility: Dave Crealy (John Lithgow). Though he presents himself as a silent, harmless figure to the care home’s staff, Crealy and his hand puppet, Jenny Pen, cause endless cruelty towards others. Crealy gets Mortensen in his crosshairs, and as the judge loses more and more of his faculties, Crealy ramps up his viciousness.
The most frustrating part of Jenny Pen is that it simply struggles to function in either of its admittedly audacious modes. As a straightforward horror movie, it’s not especially frightening. One or two of Crealy’s cruel tricks involving Jenny Pen are effective in terms of sheer shock value and grossness. Mostly, though, the frights are either generic jump scares or derivative of ominous moments in superior horror films. When something like The Rule of Jenny Pen can’t even excel as a surface-level horror film, something’s gone wrong.
Jenny Pen’s goal of also functioning as a grounded, thoughtful drama about the anguish of aging also doesn’t go according to plan. Ashcroft is too obsessed with the usual hallmarks of sensationalized depictions of the elderly, like uncontrollable bodily functions. It’s not that these elements aren’t part of a 70+ year old existence, but the way they’re explored here (both narratively and visually) is incredibly predictable. If there’s anything no horror movie can afford to be, it’s predictable.
Plus, Jenny Pen’s refusal to flesh out background elderly characters or more uniquely explore their psyches leaves the proceedings emotionally uninvolving. Crealy’s rampage across this nursing home is just occurring to distant silhouettes, not engaging figures worth getting invested in.
Talented Actors Go Through The Motions in Jenny Pen
Major props to Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow for both committing wholeheartedly to The Rule of Jenny Pen. Rush, especially, is a fixture of award season material rather than this kind of lower-brow cinema, which makes his presence here sporadically amusing. Still, Jenny Pen doesn’t offer either actor much new material to sink their respective teeth into. The script, for instance, often lets Rush ramble on endlessly as a demonstration of Mortensen flaunting his “intellectual” status. It’s a character detail too reminiscent of past Rush characters, similarly fixated on pontificating and making great use of the actor’s soothing vocal chops.
Lithgow, though fitful fun as this elderly home’s menace, has played so many psychotic antagonists over the years (in projects ranging from Blow Out to Ricochet to Cliffhanger) that his Creary character often feels like a rerun. There just isn’t much new going on in The Rule of Jenny Pen, either thematically or visually, to take familiar talents from these two talented artists into exciting, fresh territory. It’s another aspect of The Rule of Jenny Pen that leaves much to be desired.
The slower pacing similarly underwhelms. A gradual, methodical execution simply can’t make a rudimentary script as compelling as the screenplays for, say, Weapons or Companion. While I didn’t walk away from The Rule of Jenny Pen thinking it was offensively bad, I was immensely frustrated that it struggled to work as either trashy horror fun or “respectable” arthouse scary fare. Stuck between these two domains, Jenny Pen settles for being forgettable and drab instead.
Its generally positive reception, including outright euphoric responses from horror legends like Stephen King, makes it clear this title is working for many. For me, though, The Rule of Jenny Pen’s wasted potential makes it the most overrated title in an otherwise exemplary year for horror.
The Rule of Jenny Pen is now streaming on AMC+
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Image courtesy of HBO
