Maika Monroe Finally Gets to Do the Petrifying — Too Bad the Film Can't Keep Up

Victorian Psycho gives Monroe the role she's been circling for a decade, then surrounds her with a comedy that doesn't land and a structure that refuses to surprise.

Winifred Notty arrives at her new governess post with the quiet menace of someone who has already decided how this ends. The class violence of Victorian England — the brittle entitlement, the ambient misogyny, the casual disposability of servants — does real work here as ambient motive, but director Zachary Wigon and writer-adapter Virginia Feito are careful not to reduce Winifred to a feminist avenger. There's something stranger going on: a darkness she has chosen, a demon she has decided to befriend rather than fight. That choice is the film's most interesting idea, and Monroe wears it in her body before she ever says a word. Monroe has spent the better part of a decade being crowned a scream queen while being given almost nothing to actually do. It Follows made her famous for looking terrified. Longlegs and Watcher continued the pattern. Victorian Psycho is the corrective — here she does the terrorizing, and she brings an unearthly physicality to it that keeps threatening to elevate the whole enterprise. Her contortions and silences and sudden stillnesses suggest a woman housing something genuinely monstrous, and Wigon's immersive, disorienting sound design amplifies that impression into something close to dread. This is a fully committed, all-body performance, and it deserves a better film around it. The film around it is unsteady. The comedic mode Feito and Wigon reach for — broad, grotesque, slightly supernatural — doesn't land. The upper-class household where Winifred goes to work is played at a pitch so extreme it tips past satirical caricature into something closer to pantomime. Ruth Wilson and Jason Isaacs as the vile household heads, Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton as their increasingly disturbed children: all fine performers, all stranded by writing that pushes their characters past 'absurd' into 'tiresome.' The comparison to Fackham Hall — a Downton Abbey spoof — is apt and unflattering. The film shares a performer with it (Thomasin McKenzie, here playing a credulous co-worker) and occasionally shares its register. The structure is the other problem. Beneath all its gonzo flourishes — the cannibalism, the infanticide, the incest — Victorian Psycho is a classic domestic-thriller chassis, close to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (a film Monroe has already remade). There's even a predictable ulterior-motive reveal that the film presents as a twist. The chapter titles that announce themselves as wicked are, like the film's self-assessment of its own wickedness, more aspirational than actual. When a movie signals this hard that it's transgressive, it's usually because the transgression isn't quite landing on its own terms. What Wigon does well is craft a sensory environment. The sound design is genuinely unsettling — there's a low, wrong frequency that pulses under scenes involving Winifred, suggesting the presence inside her without ever explaining it. His framing is often effectively off-kilter, though he occasionally overcooks it (a CG-immersive shot of a key entering a lock is exactly the kind of flourish that earns the word 'excessive'). The gap between Monroe's performance and the film's tonal instability is the central experience of watching Victorian Psycho: you're constantly being pulled toward something genuinely disturbing, then yanked back into a comedy that isn't funny enough to justify the interruption. Feito adapted her own novel, which is either a virtue (she knows the material) or a liability (she can't cut it). Based on the result, it's some of both. The novel presumably had space for Winifred's interiority; the film compresses that into performance and atmosphere, which Monroe can carry, but the structural beats and the comedy setpieces feel like they arrived from a different, noisier adaptation. The film it most wants to be — strange, funny, violent, genuinely transgressive — is visible in every Monroe scene. The film it actually is keeps getting in the way.