Laura Kremmel
The New Zealand film The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024) is an innovative addition to a growing number of films about aging, care homes, and dementia, and it stands out for its lack of supernatural elements as the source of abuse and horror. Like films such as The Manor (2021), terror comes not from the staff but from other residents, alongside the horrors of their own aging minds and bodies. It also joins films like The Visit (2015) and Relic (2020), in which the central threat to the protagonists is aging people with dementia themselves rather than an external demonic force that has possessed them, as we see in The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014). Unlike sentimental family dramas of aging grandparents and parents that are mostly about the emotions of family members, the horror genre expertly explores the shocking and fearful experiences of losing independence and self-reliance. Not only is the space of the care home an uncanny one—and this home seems to be one of the nice ones!—but the body and mind become foreign and disturbing.[i]
