Victorian Psycho

In Victorian Psycho, the impeccably mannered world of nineteenth-century England is invaded by a woman whose idea of good housekeeping involves removing both stains and inconvenient human beings. The year is 1858 when Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House, an imposing residence stranded amid the Yorkshire moors, to become governess to Andrew and Drusilla Pounds. Her employers, the pompous John Pounds and his icily controlling wife Emily, are too consumed by privilege to notice the danger standing in their drawing room. Admittedly, Winifred makes only a limited effort to appear harmless: she carries trophies from previous encounters, speaks to the murderous presence inside her as though it were an intimate companion and considers eating a severed ear a perfectly reasonable private indulgence. Adapted by novelist Virginia Feito from her own book, the film immediately overturns the traditional governess narrative. This is no innocent young woman threatened by a haunted mansion; Winifred may be the most terrifying thing the mansion has ever admitted through its doors.

Having spent much of her horror career running from death in It Follows, Watcher and Longlegs, Maika Monroe clearly relishes the opportunity to become its author. Her Winifred moves with the rigid precision of someone who has studied acceptable behaviour without ever understanding it, arranging her face into smiles that arrive a second too late and remain several seconds too long. The performance is deliberately heightened but never careless. Beneath the deadened gaze and sudden flashes of ecstasy, Maika Monroe conveys a woman continually negotiating with Fred, the darkness she has named and almost tenderly nurtured. Her soft voiceover gives the audience access to thoughts far more violent than her composed exterior suggests, turning elaborate observations about sanity, pain and respectability into the film’s sharpest jokes. Even her wandering English accent can be understood as part of Winifred’s performance: another imperfect disguise adopted by a woman attempting to impersonate the kind of person this household might accept.

Director Zachary Wigon, following the psychologically combative Sanctuary, treats Ensor House less as a realistic home than as a diseased mind built from stone, candlelight and expensive wallpaper. Cinematographer Nico Aguilar uses tilted frames, intrusive wide-angle lenses, keyhole perspectives and restless movements to place the camera inside Winifred’s instability. At one point, the film even adopts the point of view of something she swallows, an inspired piece of visual bad taste that captures the production’s mischievous personality. The ashen interiors and looming kennels create a satisfyingly oppressive Gothic environment, while Ariel Marx supplies a score of uneasy strings, whispers and half-heard cries. Yet the images become livelier whenever Winifred begins to lose control, as though the filmmaking itself has been waiting impatiently for Victorian decorum to collapse. A body-mounted camera accompanying one of her attacks makes her dress appear to glide through the carnage, transforming a symbol of feminine restriction into the costume of a predator.

The Pounds family hardly represents a sane alternative. Jason Isaacs plays John Pounds as a preening monument to male certainty, devoted to absurd theories such as phrenology and casually dismissive of his daughter’s education. Ruth Wilson is even more effective as Emily Pounds, finding insecurity beneath the matriarch’s cruelty and delivering every monstrous remark with the conviction of someone quoting an indisputable social law. Their behaviour supplies the film’s anti-class satire: servants are treated as disposable objects, women’s intelligence is described as a medical danger, and a fashionable mummy-viewing party turns colonial desecration into drawing-room entertainment. The recurring pineapple, then an extravagant emblem of status, becomes an unexpectedly funny symbol of a society so devoted to appearances that it cannot recognise the psychopath at its table. Jacobi Jupe gives Andrew a persuasive mixture of inherited entitlement and childish vulnerability, while Evie Templeton lends the neglected Drusilla a watchful ambiguity that hints she may understand Winifred better than anyone. As the kindly Miss Lamb, Thomasin McKenzie brings warmth to a role that is regrettably given too little room before the story’s appetite for destruction takes over.

The central joke is that Winifred’s claim to be “the sanest person” she knows becomes marginally less ridiculous with every new aristocratic obscenity. Nevertheless, Victorian Psycho wisely stops short of turning her into a straightforward avenging heroine. Her victims are not exclusively representatives of patriarchal oppression, and her violence is too impulsive and indiscriminate to qualify as justice. That moral ugliness gives the film a more interesting edge than the familiar good for her fantasy it occasionally resembles. Its most provocative suggestion is that rebellion and psychosis may temporarily wear the same smile, without ever becoming the same thing. Unfortunately, the screenplay postpones important information about Winifred’s connection to the family until late in the story. Revealing part of that motive earlier might have added emotional tension to her increasingly unstable performance instead of leaving the audience simply to anticipate the next disappearance.

For a film called Victorian Psycho, however, the final act feels oddly reluctant to surrender completely to madness. Zachary Wigon builds expectations of a grand, blood-drenched reckoning but delivers a climax less outrageous than the opening provocations promise. The competing tones—Gothic nightmare, class satire, feminist revenge story and broad black comedy produce exhilarating collisions, yet they do not always fuse into a coherent whole. Some jokes are deliciously dry, others overextended, and the absence of genuine suspense makes several deaths feel like punchlines waiting for their cue. Even so, the film’s unruly energy, sumptuous craftsmanship and fearless leading performance prevent it from becoming merely an elegant curiosity. Victorian Psycho may pull its sharpest punches when it should be twisting the knife, but watching Maika Monroe exchange the role of scream queen for smiling executioner remains a wicked pleasure. It is a beautifully dressed act of cinematic insubordination uneven, knowingly grotesque and just memorable enough to make one wish it had gone fully, gloriously feral.

Victorian Psycho
Directed by Zachary Wigon
Written by Virginia Feito, based on her novel
Produced by Dan Kagan, Sebastien Raybaud, Wigon; complete producing credits not publicly announced
Starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, Jason Isaacs, Ruth Wilson, Evie Templeton, Jacobi Jupe
Cinematography: Nico Aguilar
Edited by Lance Edmands, Dustin Chow
Music by Ariel Marx
Production companies: Anton
Distributed by Bleecker Street (United States)
Release dates: September 25, 2026 (United States)
Running time: 90 minutes

Seen on 11 September 2026