Murder in retirement communities is becoming a trend. First, there is the popularity of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, a mystery series that Netflix is adapting with an A-list cast. (Editor’s note: And that one excellent episode of Poker Face!) Now there’s also the upcoming movie, The Rule of Jenny Pen, which features John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush as two residents in a nursing home, Lithgow playing a sadistic patient with a demented baby doll, and Rush playing a new member of the home who faces Lithgow’s wrath.
The movie comes from a short story of the same name by Owen Marshall, with a screenplay co-written by director James Ashcroft and Eli Kent.
Here’s the movie’s official synopsis:
Arrogant Judge Stefan Mortensen (Rush) suffers a near-fatal stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed and confined to a retirement home. Resistant to the staff and distant from his friendly roommate, Mortensen soon clashes with seemingly gentle resident Dave Crealy (Lithgow) who secretly terrorizes the home with a sadistic game called “The Rule of Jenny Pen” while wielding his dementia doll as an instrument of cruelty. What begins as childish torment quickly escalates into far more sinister and disturbing incidents. When Mortensen’s pleas to the staff go unanswered, he takes it upon himself to put an end to Crealy’s reign of terror.
The almost three-minute trailer IFC released today gives us a better look at the movie than the teaser we’ve already seen. In it, we see how Lithgow’s Dave Crealy grows to embrace his violent ways when no one checks him… until Mortensen aims to do so.
“The film is about tyranny in a place you least expect it,” Ashcroft said in a statement. “Tyrants grow quickly, like weeds when given the right conditions to thrive, and their actions often occur in private, behind closed doors, tucked away in the corners away from prying eyes. They are insidious in their intent—whether in the school yard, in corporate structures, governments, or in this case, a rest home.”
He added, “I think the worst villains—both fictional and factual—are usually the most craven, only capable of feeling powerful when keeping others down. Often they possess little to no imagination. A coward with a dull mind can be a dangerous thing. But, it’s also a film about the choices we make in the face of oppression—whether to stand up to it or lay down before it, and how these choices are often less black and white than we would like to believe.”
The Rule of Jenny Pen premieres in theaters on March 7, 2025.
Check out the trailer below.
