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‘Victorian governesses can be psychopaths, too’ isn’t quite the radical spin on a period costume drama this off-kilter romp seems to think it is – after all, every other gothic novel seems to boast a deranged tutor you’d shepherd your bonnet-wearing offspring across a country lane to avoid. Still, Maika Monroe’s unhinged young educator Winifred Notty takes the trope into gory new terrain in critic-turned-director Zachary Wigon’s (Sanctuary) playful but punchless period horror.
Temporarily done with scream-queen duties after a pair of slam-dunk horrors in It Follows and Longlegs, Monroe now seems fully settled into her cuckoo-in-the-nest era. Unlike 2025’s remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, there’s no pretending that Winifred is anything other than stark-raving mad when she arrives at the household of Jason Isaacs’ sleazy and sclerotic old buffer Mr Pound and his wife (Ruth Wilson) with a letter of recommendation and a trail of mysteriously disappeared families behind her. Their two children (Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton) are about to get an education they hadn’t bargained for.
As the on-the-nose title of screenwriter Virginia Feito’s source novel hints, you’re not getting the elegant filleting of aristocratic mores of a Peter Greenaway film here. Instead, it’s the slash-and-hack energy of a pulpy horror with a powdered wig on. That’s not to decry Victorian Psycho’s headrush pleasures, mostly delivered by the excellent Monroe – albeit boasting an accent of no fixed abode – with flamboyant support from Isaacs and Wilson as a pair of landed numpties who only wake up to the danger in their midst when it’s far too late and Thomasin McKenzie as their guileless servant.
A pulpy horror with a powdered wig on
For all the insolent zest of Monroe’s psychopathic nanny and the punky, down-with-the-patriarchy energy, it all feels a little too weightless and arch. Wigon executes the bloody splurges with flair but fails to build up to them with stakes or tension. When even the cherubic Jupe feels disposal – and we just got done weeping buckets for him in Hamnet – there’s something amiss.
But there’s still plenty in Wigon’s confidently irreverent riff on period fare – including surely the first ever use of Chekhov’s pineapple – to promise more to come in the genre from the former Village Voice critic. Maybe Edwardian Psycho next?
Victorian Psycho premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.