Victorian Psycho is a blood-soaked daydream that is more fun than it has any right to be.
Zachary Wigon’s adaptation of Virginia Feito’s novel, with Feito writing the screenplay herself, does have a plot. There’s a governess, a wealthy family, a secret she brought with her. I could walk you through all of it, and you would come away with almost no idea why I had such a good time.
I had a good time because of Maika Monroe. You could pull out half of this movie’s story mechanics and I would still happily watch her glide through a mansion, quietly working out which person in the room would be easiest to kill. That isn’t the most dignified reason to recommend a film. It’s the honest one.
Winifred Notty
Monroe plays Winifred Notty, who arrives at Ensor House in 1858 to serve as governess to the Pounds children. We figure out almost immediately that something is badly wrong with her. The household takes longer, and most of the fun lives in the gap between those two discoveries.
Watch her face. Monroe has a crooked little smile that shows up at exactly the wrong moments, and her eyes carry a devilish glint that never fully switches off. Half the time Winifred looks like she has noticed something horrible that everyone else at the table missed. The other half, she looks like she arranged it.
I’ve liked Monroe for years, but most of her best known horror work puts her on the receiving end of the terror. Here she gets to be funny, grotesque, charming, frightening and ridiculous. Sometimes she’s all five inside one scene. I kept waiting for a seam to show, some moment where the switch between registers felt like effort. It never came.
There’s something childlike about Winifred. She has a child’s curiosity and a child’s attention span. She’s also a child who might murder somebody because the conversation got boring, which changes the picture considerably.
Monroe never settles for generic madness. The comedy comes from watching Winifred try to perform normal: the proper posture, the polite reply, the correct governess face. Meanwhile she’s plainly tuned to a completely different station than everyone around her. The tiny reactions carry the most weight. A smile that arrives a beat too late. A pleasant answer delivered slightly off rhythm. Each lands as a joke, and a second later it curdles into a threat.
That’s why the Samara Weaving comparison keeps coming to mind. They are very different performers, and I’m not suggesting Monroe is doing a Ready or Not impression. What they share is an ear for the heightened frequency horror comedy runs on, and the discipline to play at that pitch without tipping into parody. Weaving has owned that space for a while. After Victorian Psycho, Monroe can fight her for it.
The House Around Her
Ensor House is a gorgeous place to watch someone refuse to behave. Everything about the Pounds home is built to impose order: the manners, the rigid class lines, the narrow ideas about how a woman should stand, speak and want. Winifred seems to have been assembled without whatever part is supposed to receive those instructions.
Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson play Mr. and Mrs. Pounds, and their respectability is the straight line the joke needs. Every stiff greeting and every careful social rule hands Winifred one more thing to violate. Thomasin McKenzie appears as Miss Lamb, one more piece of the household Winifred has to navigate.
The satire is there if you want it. A family obsessed with appearances hires a young woman to shape its children, and she turns out to be the least respectable thing in the building. The film never lectures about Victorian hypocrisy, though. It just keeps putting Winifred in rooms built for good behavior and letting us watch the furniture sweat.
Funny Until Somebody Starts Bleeding
There’s plenty of blood in Victorian Psycho, and plenty of ugliness smeared across very pretty surroundings. What surprised me is the mood. This is not a grim movie, and it isn’t cruel for the sake of feeling serious. It’s mischievous. There’s a sick little grin underneath the whole thing, and after a while you catch yourself grinning back.
That’s the difference between wicked and merely comedic. Plenty of horror comedies land a laugh and then flinch, as if they need to reassure you nobody really got hurt. Victorian Psycho doesn’t flinch. The jokes have victims, and the movie knows exactly how funny it is that the victims are so well dressed.
The pleasure isn’t shock value. It’s watching refinement and gore share a frame so comfortably that the contrast becomes its own punchline.
The Story Almost Doesn’t Matter
Winifred has her own reasons for taking this particular position. They involve the truth about her biological father, and eventually her past collides with the Pounds family in ways that matter to where the film ends up. I won’t go further than that.
The machinery works. It gives the movie somewhere to go and a reason for Winifred to stay put. I just didn’t care about it nearly as much as I cared about the next thirty seconds of her face. Whenever the plot pulled focus, I wanted it to hurry up and hand the room back to her.
I don’t count that as a real complaint. Victorian Psycho simply found something far more interesting than its own story, and I can’t blame it for noticing.
Final Assessment
I walked out of Fantastic Fest convinced Maika Monroe owns this movie. The crooked smile, the devilish eyes and the polite little voice with something rotten under it hold the entire thing together.
I would happily watch another two hours of Winifred wandering the halls of Ensor House, making everyone around her deeply uncomfortable. Somebody give her another house. Preferably not mine.
