In ‘Victorian Psycho’ the Governess is Not Alright

Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House insisting, via narration, that “I am the sanest person I know.” Saying all this while looking like a hot mess lets the audience know she’s full of it.

That contradiction is the beating heart of Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho, adapted by Virginia Feito from her own novel of the same name. Winifred, played with delicious instability by Maika Monroe, has been hired by Mr. and Mrs. Pounds (played by Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson) as governess to two wealthy children, Drusilla (Evie Templeton) and Andrew (Jacobi Jupe), but from the second she walks through the door, something is off. She watches the family eat because she does not know proper table etiquette. She studies everyone around her like she is learning how to pass as normal. Then she finds a severed ear under her bed and responds in a way that makes it very clear we are not dealing with Mary Poppins.

Wigon understands exactly what kind of movie he is making. Victorian Psycho is Gothic in almost every possible sense, but it is also campy, strange, musical, and deeply funny in how seriously Winifred takes her own madness. Fola Abatan’s cinematography rarely settles for the obvious angle. The camera tilts, creeps, glides, and sometimes makes the furniture feel like it has opinions. The lighting is shadowy and elegant without becoming visually muddy, giving Ensor House the oppressive feeling of a place that has been rotting emotionally long before Winifred showed up. The score is equally unnerving. It does not just accompany scenes, it pokes at you. Sounds stretch, distort, and make otherwise ordinary moments feel slightly diseased.

Monroe is terrific because she never plays Winifred like someone unaware of her instability. There is a self-consciousness there. She knows something is wrong. The question is whether her memories are trustworthy, whether the world around her is as cruel as she believes, or whether those two things can be true at once.

The strongest component here is that Victorian Psycho is more than a “crazy governess kills rich people” story. Sure, it’s another story about haves and have-nots, but filtered through the treatment of women. Winifred wants access to this family’s world, but not really through seduction. She wants proximity, familiarity, legitimacy. She is trying to insert herself into a system that has already decided what someone like her is worth. The film’s ugliest moments are not always the violent ones either.

One of the tensest scenes involves Drusilla being forced to watch her artwork destroyed. Nothing supernatural happens. Nobody gets stabbed. It is just cruelty, control, and humiliation, staged with such stillness that it becomes harder to watch than some of the gore. That scene gets at what Victorian Psycho is really after. Women in this world are constantly being told they are too much, too strange, too emotional, too improper, too difficult. Eventually, that mistreatment hardens into identity. Someone tells you long enough that you are bad, and maybe one day you decide to become very good at it.

Victorian Psycho is less American Psycho than Saltburn by way of a gothic fever dream. It is about class, resentment, performance, and what happens when someone who has spent her life being pushed to the margins finally stops asking permission. Killers are not always born. Sometimes somebody makes them.