Movie Review: The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025) seen in theatres

Horror/Thriller: not recommended for young children; frightening scenes, nudity, coarse language, graphic violence, brief but intense sexual content, scenes depicting elderly care and abuse, graphic medical scenes, scenes depicting manipulation of bodily functions, scenes depicting death, scenes depicting elderly mental health conditions and physical conditions, scenes with implications of possible elderly abandonment

This movie follows an elderly man with a child like mentality who terrorizes other residents within the nursing home where he resides with the help of a children’s hand puppet who is named Jenny Pen.

Congratulations are in order as far as this movie is concerned. I honestly never thought I would ever label a supposed horror movie as scary again given how lackluster other movies which were labelled as such left me unafraid. This movie actually frightened me to the point where I wanted to leave halfway through. The scary thing about this, (no pun intended,) is that the actor who plays the elderly gentleman in this movie is seen as a soft person with a gentle personality. I’ve never known him to play a character which was this evil. It got to the point where I had yet to reenter reality following the movie and I was quick to make the suggestion to mom to first never view this movie but more importantly tell her that she is never taking up residence in a retirement home especially where this guy resides. I don’t even know if this is possible or if it makes any sense but I actually started to feel sick while watching this movie given the graphic nudity of the old people, (as a matter of fact, this was pretty much the entire cast of this movie given it takes place in a retirement home,) and also the things he was doing with the puppet throughout this movie were disgusting. This movie was really hard to get through and it was one of those movies where the ending couldn’t come fast enough. At times, I had to remind myself that it was just a movie and that it has no effect on me at all, even though certain things happened in reality following this movie which lead me to actually believe that the elderly man in the movie was causing these things to happen. I couldn’t get an answer from mom the first time I tried to call her following the movie, (which is something that was known to happen long before me seeing this movie,) and also, I could not shake the image of him throughout this movie or the puppet. It actually made me feel dizzy to think about if this makes any sense. I’ll tell everybody what doesn’t make sense. Why did I choose to see this movie? This is one of those movies where I suppose I failed to analyze how scary it was before I saw it. Having said that, there is one thing that does make sense. I’M NEVER SEEING THIS MOVIE AGAIN AND WOULD NOT RECOMMEND IT TO ANYBODY. What an absolute waste of time, energy, and for my case at least, mental health. This is by far one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year and probably the worst one I’ll see in my whole life.

Movie rating: -20 out of 20

Next movie review: TBD