Victorian Psycho Review: Maika Monroe's Costume Slasher Is Bloody Fun

Though it could have used a stronger story to hold it together, this playful period horror movie is creepy, funny, and a showcase for Maika Monroe.

Published Nov 10, 2026, 9:00 AM EST

Alex is the Senior Editor of Reviews & Prestige Content, overseeing ScreenRant's film reviews as one of its Rotten Tomatoes-approved critics. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in English, he spent a locked-down year in Scotland completing a Master's in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which he hears is a nice, lively city. He now lives in and works from Milan, Italy, conveniently a short train ride from the Venice Film Festival, which he first covered for SR in 2024.

Victorian Psycho deserves a lot of credit for not taking itself very seriously. There is an obvious, literary potential in the image of a murderous governess – something that draws on the lineage of texts like Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw and splices it with violence to say something about societal repression, or gender, or a number of other big ideas. This threat of meaning is constantly bubbling underneath the story, and I was waiting for the movie to click everything together and clarify whatever its message was supposed to be.

Not having read it, I can't speak to how this is handled in Virginia Feito's 2025 novel of the same name. But though there are potentially significant details sprinkled throughout, the film adaptation, which Feito herself wrote, politely declines to latch onto any of them. There's enough material to support different readings, if that's how you'd like to approach it. Feito and director Zachary Wigon seem to care more that you enjoy yourself and, perhaps, are a little freaked out.

They do a good job delivering that experience. Victorian Psycho is at its best as a collection of horror movie moments, with the unsettling set pieces pairing nicely with a talented cast having fun playing up the period piece trappings. The film is weaker as a narrative, however, and would have been better served as a thrill ride by a more structured, involving plot. Being so closely tied to the killer's perspective brings unhinged delights, but it misses out on some of the benefits of coherence.

Maika Monroe Is Delightfully Creepy In Victorian Psycho

Wigon makes no effort to hide the path we're on. Victorian Psycho opens with the camera pointed directly at Winifred Notty's (Maika Monroe) face, head disconcertingly tilted, as she declares herself in voiceover to be the "sanest" person she's ever met. The camera, however, is tilted to match her; this is Winifred's film, and we'll be experiencing it right along with her. When we meet her, she's arriving at Ensor House, the country manor of the Pounds family, to be the new governess of their two children, Drusilla (Evie Templeton) and Andrew (Jacobi Jupe). Occasionally, she tells herself this won't be like the last time.

The vibes aren't great at Ensor House, in all the ways you might expect. Andrew is a bit of an entitled brat, and as the male heir, the only child that gets any real attention. The formidable, mercurial Mrs. Pounds (Ruth Wilson) terrorizes the staff. Mr. Pounds (Jason Isaacs) is eager to get himself in a room alone with Winifred. They channel the clichés of this kind of story so that they can be upended by the new governess, who oscillates between someone barely keeping their madness at bay and someone possessed by a bloodthirsty demon itching to be let out.

Monroe is the movie's best special effect.

Whether Maika Monroe is entirely believable as a British person is beside the point – she is a lot of fun in this role. A good deal of Victorian Psycho is spent with the camera pointed at her face, and she unleashes an extensive repertoire of creepy grins and ecstatic contortions that, if encountered in real life, would be quite frightening on their own. As much as it helps that cinematographer Nico Aguilar lights her just right on several occasions, Monroe is the movie's best special effect.

The rest of the actors are essentially tasked with finding interesting ways to respond to her, and they all do, Wilson and Isaacs most successfully. Although, I should note that filmmakers may want to be careful with how they deploy Jacobi Jupe, at least for now. The young actor made his mark with a touching performance in last year's Hamnet, and he proves here that his emotional vulnerability was no fluke – almost to this movie's detriment. He inhabits the bratty heir perfectly well, but when he shifts to playing afraid, he pulls the tone of the film along with him. Winifred reserves some special torments for him, which, on paper, is a fun motif. But with Jupe on the receiving end, I could too easily imagine them becoming like Jacob Tremblay's harrowing sequence in Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep.

Victorian Psycho's storytelling is closely tied to Winifred's perspective, and that allows for some interesting and unsettling formal touches. Moment to moment, these prove effective: Wigon is creative with both the camera and sound design, in ways that are gradually destabilizing. That approach has its drawbacks, too. In terms of horror heritage, Victorian Psycho is far more indebted to Mary Harron's American Psycho than Hitchcock's Psycho, but without the former's commitment to its satirical edge, our unmooring takes us to less compelling places.

A bit more of a narrative backbone could have had a positive impact here. Still, Victorian Psycho has more than enough to recommend it to audiences who like their horror with a playful spark.

Victorian Psycho releases in theaters on Friday, November 13.