The Delirious Victorian Psycho Gives Maika Monroe Her Best Role Yet
The Longlegs star is an unhinged treat in the film adaptation of Virginia Feito’s hit novel.
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.
Screenwriter Virginia Feito adapts her own novel for the film version of Victorian Psycho, and some of the movie’s most delicious lines are taken straight from the book. Although they have nothing to do with each other in terms of plot, one thing Victorian Psycho does share with Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho is a first-person narrator who’s not just unreliable, she’s psychotic. She’s also very witty, and Monroe narrates much of the film in voiceover as Winifred, delivering the effortlessly wordy bon mots that are the film’s greatest pleasure.
Monroe accompanies these pithy remarks with a performance that’s as controlled as her character is frantic, walking stiff-armed as she zeroes in on a victim and beaming beatifically as the blood starts to flow. Her voice is soft, and her eyes are hard. She keeps dissociating and snapping back to reality. And the camerawork, which is highly mobile from the start, gets increasingly restless as Winifred drifts. The nuances of Monroe’s facial expressions are essential: The moaning of tortured ghosts and occult symbols cracking and popping in a fireplace both clearly telegraph Winifred’s madness, but it's Monroe’s glazed, faraway stare that really sells it.
Not that her reality is something worth hanging on to. “I’m the sanest person I know,” Winifred quips in an opening monologue, and indeed the high-society world she lives in is objectively insane. Mr. Pounds is an avid phrenologist, for example, and Mrs. Pounds sees nothing wrong with cutting off a scullery maid’s hair and using it as a flyswatter. A scene where the lord and lady of the manor host a mummy-viewing party effectively conveys the grotesque callousness of the Victorian upper classes, and although the tossed-off jokes about education affecting women’s fertility and the pointlessness of daughters can get repetitive, they are historically accurate.
Director Zachary Wigon pulls out many of the same tricks in Victorian Psycho as he did in his debut feature, Sanctuary. There, the overhead shots and precise pivots were meant to disguise the fact that the film takes place entirely in one room; here, their purpose is more thematic, conveying the overwhelming chaos inside Winifred’s mind. That being said, the scope of the film is narrow, never straying farther than the doghouse where Winifred sleeps when she displeases Mrs. Pounds or the estate’s pigpen at night. (Pigs will eat anything.) This gives the movie a claustrophobic feel, a real ”I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me” kind of vibe.
There’s only one area where Victorian Psycho could have given us more, and it’s a big one: The film is all talk when it comes to gore, spraying blood from jugulars and spattering it on expensive wallpaper but not really reveling in the gruesome details. (Then again, maybe it’s better not to linger on a baby’s throat being cut.) Here, again, the emphasis is on immersive, flashy camerawork, as Monroe stabs her way through the Pounds household with a body-mounted camera rig attached to the waist of her floor-length dress.
This can all, admittedly, be a bit much, and Victorian Psycho will undoubtedly have its retractors as well as its fans. The overall mood is one of pulpy, delirious excess, and the film is a cheeky entry into the burgeoning “good for her” subgenre that relishes it when women violently lash out against patriarchal oppression. It’s a guilty pleasure, but at least it’s a guilty pleasure for the literate, starring an actor who has just begun to reveal everything that she has to give.
