Often labeled as a “scream queen,” over the past several years Maika Monroe has really come into her own as a performer. Her turn as clairvoyant FBI agent Lee Harker in Longlegs was a career highlight, and her latest film, Victorian Psycho, is a new high-water mark for the star. Monroe embodies eccentric governess Winifred Notty — if you consider spree murdering “eccentric” — with a hair-trigger twitchiness, tilting her neck and pulling one side of her mouth to indicate her character’s true feelings when propriety demands that she keep silent. And given that the story takes place in an aristocratic English country house circa 1858, there’s a lot of propriety to contend with here.
Winifred has come to the handsome stone residence known as Ensor House in order to take a job as a governess. Her last two sets of upper-class charges perished under mysterious circumstances, but the harrumphing Mr. Pounds (Jason Isaacs) and his casually cruel wife Mrs. Pounds (Ruth Wilson) don’t need to know that. As long as the children can be frightened into behaving, and don’t tell their parents about some of her more unconventional teachings — “all living things are constantly in pain,” she tells young Andrew (Jacobi Jupe) and Drissila (Evie Templeton) after fatally stabbing a baby deer in front of them — everything should be fine, and “it” won’t happen again. Except the darkness inside Winifred is very much alive, and all but assures that “it” will.
