has reviewed Victorian Psycho, a period horror thriller that gives Maika Monroe a deeply unsettling lead role as Winifred Notty. In the film, Notty arrives at Ensor House in 1858 as the governess to two wealthy children and announces herself as the sanest person she has ever met.
That is the hook now because the film is being sized up not just as another gothic shocker, but as a fresh screen turn for Monroe in a story built around a woman who seems to know exactly how frightening she is. Zachary Wigon directs, while Virginia Feito wrote the screenplay from her 2025 novel, and the cast also includes Evie Templeton as Drusilla, Jacobi Jupe as Andrew, Jason Isaacs as Mr. Pounds, Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Pounds and Thomasin McKenzie as Miss Lamb.
The setup matters because the movie stays largely inside Ensor House, using the house itself as a pressure chamber. Feito’s story is not just about a governess with a terrible reputation; it is about a woman who has come off a string of appointments in which the children in her care met tragic ends, and yet she walks into this job as if she has finally found a place where the truth can be spoken aloud.
That is where the film’s most interesting split appears. Notty may think a malevolent force is working through her, but the world around her is hardly innocent. Mr. Pounds wants her to get Andrew ready for boarding school next year, Mrs. Pounds is jealous of her, and Pounds also says Drusilla is at an age where she risks her fertility by overeducation. The film’s menace, then, does not sit in one body or one room. It hangs over the house itself, where manners, status and cruelty press in from every side.
What gives the review its edge is that the mystery is not whether Notty is dangerous. It is whether she is the cause of the horror, or one of the things the horror has made possible. With Monroe at the center and the story locked inside Ensor House, Victorian Psycho looks built to leave the audience with one hard question: whether the violence comes from the governess, or from the world that shaped her.
