Fantastic Fest Review: Victorian Psycho

Winifred Notty is the sanest person she has ever met. This must be true, because she says it to herself so often. And clearly one would require the sanest person alive as the governess for two children at a manor house in 19th century Yorkshire. 

The idea of the well-balanced young lady of lower social class finding herself in a remote and austere house, far from safety or family and at the dangerous whims of an aristocratic family, is a mainstay of Gothic literature. Oh, and the Pounds have secrets and shadows aplenty. Mr. Pounds (Jason Isaacs under a broom of a moustache) is the heir to dark family legacies and has become obsessed with phrenology. Mrs. Pounds (Ruth Wilson), as hard as the stones of the house itself, is a crystalline image of the velvet-dressed lady of the manor and likely to explode at any second, sending shards in all directions. As for the children, precocious Andrew (Hamnet’s Jacobi Jupe) and willowy Drusilla (Evie Templeton), they’re both one turn of the screw from being pure portraits of malice.

But the truth is that they’re about the least dangerous members of the household once the wildly overly-enthusiatic Winifred (Maika Monroe) arrives at their door. She is the new governess for the children, hired to raise Andrew to be a proper gentleman and Drusilla to not be too much of a nuisance for any potential future husband. Winifred may think she’s a good judge of character, but then she is utterly the center of her own world. When first seen, she’s in the back of the Pounds’ carriage, head to one side at an almost unnatural angle, with everything else off-kilter around her. When she straightens her neck, cinematographer Nico Aguilar turns the world to keep her face constantly upright. It’s part of the constant giddy dance between Monroe and the camera that helps craft one of the best horror characters of the decade. 

At the core, of course, is Monroe’s performance. In films like modern stalker classic Watcher, the satanic majesty of Longlegs, and of course her breakout performance in It Follows, she has taken the crown of modern scream queen through her innovations on the iconic idea of the final girl. In screenwriter Virginia Feito’s adaptation of her own 2025 novel, Monroe finally gets to be the deliriously incorrigible villain. Of course, through her eyes, she really can’t be blamed for the graveyard of bodies and disappeared charges that she has left at her previous places of employment.

But unlike other hamfisted recent attempts at Gothic horror with a female killer, neither Feito nor director Zachary Wigon confuse antagonist with protagonist. Just because Winifred is the central character, that doesn’t make her the hero. While audiences are being subjected to Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story shamelessly aping 2018’s Lizzie to turn America’s most famous parricidal killer into a feminist icon, Victorian Psycho feels more progressive for letting dear Winnie be absolutely out of her mind for no overwhelming societal reason. To misquote the old wisdom, sometimes an axe-wielding murderer is just an axe-wielding murderer. 

Monroe clearly relishes every second of her eye-whirling lunacy. It’s a performance that’s equal parts overblown mania and tiny tics, both of which Monroe glides between effortlessly. She’s so delightfully unhinged that one can’t help but feel for the Pounds, a family whose odd behaviors and neuroses finally push Winifred to her favorite breaking point. They don’t so much poke the bear as accidentally shake the swarm of murderous wasps in a bee costume, and their occasional realizations of exactly how many bats Winifred has in her belfry are cackle-inducing (Jupe in particular has a flair for expressing the horrified wonder of a child grasping that the adult in the room is not to be trusted).

A Penny Dreadful brought to glorious, wicked life, Victorian Psycho never slows in its corseted dance toward the inevitable bloodbath. Absurd as it is witty and grotesque, it’s a perfect period horror-comedy.

Victorian Psycho arrives in U.S. theatres on November 13.

Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.

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