Blood and good manners do not usually share a frame. The new trailer for Victorian Psycho locks them in the same drawing room and lets them sort it out.
Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty, and the footage introduces her the way a governess should be introduced. Composed. Polite. Hands folded at the waist. Then it starts showing what sits under all that starch, and the answer involves a considerable amount of arterial spray.
Bleecker Street released the official trailer on Thursday. The film opens in U.S. theaters on September 25.
A governess, a manor, and a staffing problem
The official synopsis drops us in 1858. Winifred arrives at Ensor House, a remote gothic manor, to take up a position with the family. She settles in. Staff members begin disappearing without explanation. The owners of the estate start wondering whether the woman they hired to educate their children is quite what she claimed to be.
That skeleton is the engine of nearly every Victorian governess story ever written. A woman with no money and no standing gets placed inside a house full of both. She is handed authority over the children and none over anything else, then expected to stay invisible while exercising it. Victorian Psycho keeps the setup intact and hands the woman a weapon.
What the trailer actually shows
The footage runs roughly ninety seconds and it does not tiptoe.
The standout beat is a lesson. Winifred stands over her two young charges and delivers the day’s instruction with total serenity. “When you come across an animal in pain, the merciful thing to do is to kill it,” she tells them. One of the children objects that the animal is still alive. She is not troubled by this.
That single exchange lays out the film’s tonal proposal. She says it in the same measured voice a governess would use for Latin declensions. The joke and the threat land in the same breath, and neither one blinks first.
After that the cutting gets faster and considerably wetter. Monroe turns up again and again with blood streaked across her face, drifting through dim corridors in full period dress with an expression parked somewhere between distraction and delight.
What the trailer withholds is interesting. It never really pretends there is a mystery about whether Winifred is dangerous. The open question is how far the movie intends to go and how amused it plans to be while going there. The R rating offers a clue, since the film is rated for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material.
The house and the people in it
Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson play Mr. and Mrs. Pounds, the couple who own Ensor House. Thomasin McKenzie is Ms. Lamb. Hamnet breakout Jacobi Jupe plays Andrew Pounds, with Evie Templeton as Drusilla Pounds and Amy De Bhrún as Mrs. Fancey.
Zachary Wigon directed. Virginia Feito wrote the screenplay, adapting her own novel. Dan Kagan and Sebastien Raybaud produced, with Anton financing. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May and shot on location in Ireland.
Why this particular team is worth your attention
Monroe has spent a decade being chased. It Follows made her the most pursued woman in modern horror. Watcher stuck her on the wrong side of a stranger’s window. Longlegs had her tracking something she could never fully see. This trailer flips the geometry entirely. She is the thing in the house now, and she looks like she is having a lovely time.
There is a nice bit of trivia buried in the production history too. Margaret Qualley was originally cast as Winifred before exiting the project, and Qualley also led Wigon’s previous feature.
That feature is Sanctuary, a 2022 two hander with Qualley and Christopher Abbott confined to one hotel room for a night of escalating power reversal between a dominatrix and her wealthy client. Wigon spent an entire film on money, control, and who gets to decide the rules. A governess inside a rich family’s house is the same problem wearing a corset.
Feito adapting her own book carries some risk. It also means nobody had to explain the joke to the screenwriter.
Victorian Psycho opens in theaters September 25. Watch the official trailer above.
