Monday new releases: 24 March 2025

The Rule of Jenny Pen, Disney’s Snow White and The Last Showgirl are in cinemas.

At some point I’m going to have to stop watching everything through a political lens but this is not that week.

Two of our films in this newsletter have the same central question at their heart – whether to resist a tyrannical ruler at great personal risk or choose the safety of a quiet life under the thumb of dictatorship.

In Disney’s Snow White, they even sing a song about it. Snow White (Rachel Zegler), exiled from the castle, meets handsome Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) and his band of outlaws in the woods. She is determined to enlist them to help with her incipient rebellion against the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) who has stolen the throne and enslaved the people, but Jonathan argues – melodically if not persuasively – that staying alive is preferable to taking on a ruthless opponent who outmatches you.

In The Rule of Jenny Pen’s small town rest home, residents are tormented by a puppet-wielding bully (John Lithgow) until a stroke-ridden former judge (Geoffrey Rush) and a lame ex-All Black (George Henare) decide they have no alternative but to take the law into their own feeble hands. As Omar’s famous quote from The Wire goes, “If you come for the King, you’d better not miss.”

When the casting for this film was announced I’ll admit that I was disappointed, thinking that – once again – it seemed as if a New Zealand story could only be told if we imported a couple of stars to secure the financing. Jenny Pen is based on a New Zealand short story by Owen Marshall and I had my doubts about flying in internationals to take roles that our local acting luminaries could have done.

Here’s me eating my words. The presence of Lithgow and Rush is totally justified for the reason that they are clearly the best in the world at what they do and director James Ashcroft steers them superbly.

I had expected that this film would have more of a supernatural aspect – the endorsement from Stephen King and the trailer emphasising the utterly creepy Jenny Pen doll-turned-emotional support puppet led me astray – but it’s actually a much more relatable and upsetting horror. The myriad indignities of age: mental and physical infirmity, societal invisibility, the risk of abuse and the terrible food.

Lithgow’s Dave Crealey turns out to be an interesting villain. He has psychopathic tendencies, true, but mostly he does what he does because he’s bored and no one can stop him. The fact that his body hasn’t given out the way it has for other residents gives him a power over them, allows him to rise above the mediocrity of his previous life, and you can see how intoxicating power can be in the hands of those who never had it before.

The so-called scandals around Disney’s Snow White – the latest updating of their IP taonga for a modern age – are the least interesting topics I can imagine so I won’t indulge them here. What goes in our eyes and in our ears? That’s really all that matters.

Of all Disney’s golden age of animation – and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first back in 1937 – Snow White is the most simplistic story and the one that’s more successful the younger the audience. There’s not much here for the grown-ups which means my attempt at finding modern political parallels is even more of a stretch than usual.