{"id":464440,"date":"2026-05-28T13:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T13:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/464440\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T13:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T13:40:08","slug":"victorian-psycho-review-a-gruesome-but-ungainly-horror-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/464440\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Victorian Psycho’ Review: A Gruesome but Ungainly Horror Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe governess is thoroughly ungoverned in \u201cVictorian Psycho<\/a>,\u201d a grisly ostensible horror comedy from director Zachary Wigon<\/a> that\u2019s neither frightening nor funny enough to pass muster \u2014 and not quite outrageous enough to garner the kind of notoriety it\u2019s aiming for, either. A shot of lurid genre energy that at least provided some tonal contrast at the tail end of a generally tasteful Un Certain Regard program in Cannes, the film stars a miscast Maika Monroe<\/a> as an unhinged young woman hired by a wealthy family in rural 19th-century England to raise and educate their young son (and daughter, they add grudgingly). It doesn\u2019t take long to discover she\u2019s pretty much the anti-Mary Poppins, or maybe just the antichrist \u2014 likelier to recommend a spoonful of cyanide to make the medicine go down.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s promise in the idea of a prim, well-spoken but forever subjugated nanny wreaking bloody revenge on England\u2019s cruelly non-negotiable class system. But \u201cVictorian Psycho,\u201d adapted by Spanish author Virginia Feito from her own novel, never commits to the idea \u2014 or any idea, really \u2014 as it shows its hand early and gets straight down to the business of lavish and fairly undiscriminating bloodshed. From the get-go, there\u2019s scarcely any mystery about who Monroe\u2019s kill-happy carer Winifred Notty is, and with little countering interest in why she is, the film isn\u2019t left with much to do but cheer her on as she terrorizes her masters, her charges and her colleagues alike, at the glum Gothic mansion cursed with her presence. <\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s hard to determine exactly what Cannes selectors thought they had when they slotted former film critic Wigon\u2019s third feature in their second-most prestigious tier: Perhaps they identified more punk spirit in its prankishness than is strictly there, or were extending the benefit of the doubt from his more impressively controlled 2022 thriller \u201cSanctuary.\u201d Either way, with the luster of the festival premiere likely to have worn off by the time Bleecker Street releases the film in late September, the film hasn\u2019t much arthouse crossover potential \u2014 and while genre heads may appreciate some of the gore, the accompanying goofy quippery won\u2019t be for all of them either. If it\u2019s to find a following, it will likely be on VOD.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough she\u2019s sought to expand her repertoire with recent vehicles like the Colleen Hoover adaptation \u201cReminders of Him\u201d and the feminist fairytale \u201c100 Nights of Hero,\u201d Maika Monroe remains best known as the premier millennial scream queen. It\u2019s a reputation to which \u201cVictorian Psycho\u201d acts as a pointed rejoinder: This time she\u2019s the one causing all the screaming. From the moment we encounter Winifred in the back of a carriage bound for the forbidding Ensor House on the Yorkshire moors, there\u2019s something immediately off about her \u2014 and it\u2019s not just Monroe\u2019s peculiar RP accent, though that doesn\u2019t help. The actor\u2019s twitchy body language, in conjunction with DP Nico Aguilar\u2019s queasy deployment of wide-angle lenses, clue us into the character\u2019s extreme unwellness even before, on being shown to her quarters, she spots a severed ear on the floor (whose? how? why?) and gobbles it right up.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf Winifred is instantly, bizarrely offputting, her employers are more straightforwardly ghastly. As posh imbeciles John and Emily Pounds, Jason Isaacs<\/a> and Ruth Wilson<\/a> are directed toward full-tilt caricature to make our antiheroine look a little more human by comparison \u2014 it doesn\u2019t really work, but the two British pros do serve up the most amusing line readings and reaction shots here. The film\u2019s best performances, however, come from the youngsters playing Winifred\u2019s new wards. Jacobi Jupe<\/a> (\u201cHamnet\u201d) brings just the right blend of bratty entitlement and vulnerable na\u00efvet\u00e9 to the unfairly favored elder son Andrew, while as his perpetually disregarded sister Drusilla (\u201cShe\u2019s at an age where fertility can be ravaged by over-education,\u201d decrees her father), Evie Templeton does a subtler job than Monroe of hinting at some innate evil, perhaps equivalent to whatever demon has consumed her new governess.<\/p>\n

\n\tWinifred calls said demon Fred, by the way, and he\/she\/it gets to work early, first bloodily dispatching a lecherous gardener who threatens to reveal her secret. A tentative friendship with nervous nursemaid Miss Lamb (Thomasin McKenzie, given little to do) ends quickly and brutally, before Wini\/Fred set their sights higher. It\u2019s part of the joke that she\u2019s more or less hiding in plain sight as bodies unaccountably vanish around her \u2014 while she candidly lists the various untimely deaths and disappearances that have befallen previous children under her care \u2014 but it wears thin pretty quickly, as we merely wait for the inevitable climactic carnage, with not much secondary plotting to fill the time.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat perverse absence of tension wastes any baleful atmosphere built up by Aguilar\u2019s off-kilter lensing, Ariel Marx\u2019s loudly grumbling score or, most impressively, Jeremy Reed\u2019s ashy, expensively rotting production design, with its mixture of plush Victorian grandeur and cartoon gothic embellishments. \u201cVictorian Psycho\u201d isn\u2019t just all dressed up with nowhere to go, but equally aimless when it loses its composure: Losing your mind and surrendering to the darkness, in the movies at least, should be more fun than this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The governess is thoroughly ungoverned in \u201cVictorian Psycho,\u201d a grisly ostensible horror comedy from director Zachary Wigon that\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":464441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6403,146,85,46,108519,87513,54298,397,68317,211472,216109],"class_list":["post-464440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jacobi-jupe","tag-jason-isaacs","tag-maika-monroe","tag-movies","tag-ruth-wilson","tag-victorian-psycho","tag-zachary-wigon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}