The year is 1858. Winifred Notty has arrived at Ensor House to teach the children, maintain her composure, and — if things go according to plan — not kill anyone. Things rarely go according to plan.
Bleecker Street dropped the full official trailer for “Victorian Psycho” on Wednesday, and it lands like a comedic blackout poem written in blood. Set in a remote gothic Yorkshire manor, the film follows Winifred — played by Maika Monroe — as she dutifully tutors her charges, tells them bedtime stories, and “only jokes about eating children.” Staff start disappearing. The owners of the estate, played by Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson, begin to wonder if something is wrong with their peculiar new hire. The trailer makes clear the answer is yes, emphatically, and that Winifred has been aware of this the whole time. The longer she spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.
The film opens in theaters September 25 via Bleecker Street.
Directed by Zachary Wigon — whose last film, “Sanctuary,” starred Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott in a psychosexual power-reversal thriller — “Victorian Psycho” is based on Virginia Feito’s novel of the same name, adapted by Feito herself. The cast around Monroe is stacked: Thomasin McKenzie, Ruth Wilson, Jason Isaacs, Evie Templeton, Jacobi Jupe, Amy De Bhrún, Paul Reid, and Katherine Moran all appear, with Jupe coming off his breakout performance in “Hamnet.” The film is produced by Dan Kagan, who produced “Longlegs,” and Sebastien Raybaud, who produced “Greenland: Migration.”
The obvious touchstone is “American Psycho” — same title structure, same deadpan narration from a killer hiding in plain sight, same jet-black comedy wrapped around genuine brutality. FirstShowing described it plainly as “an entertaining spin on American Psycho but set in Victorian times.” The trailer leans into that framing, soundtracked by chugging electric guitars that clash deliberately with the corseted period setting, per Phantasmag. Beyond horror and dark comedy, the story also weaves in themes of gender, insanity, and the narrow position women occupied in Victorian society — which gives the film a bit more to say than just “governess goes feral.”
The film already has a festival track record to lean on. The film first screened at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival in May, competing in the Un Certain Regard category before drawing a range of mostly favorable reviews. IndieWire’s Kate Erbland gave it a “B” at Cannes, writing that Monroe’s Winifred “practically vibrates with the need to hold things together” and calling the performance “deliciously and dementedly” funny, while also noting the film pulls back from the novel’s more extreme content in ways that cost it some of its sharpest edges, per IndieWire. Bloody Disgusting’s own Cannes review was warmer, with Meagan Navarro writing that “carnage becomes pretty dang delightful in Maika Monroe’s capable hands” and calling the film “an absolute blast thanks to its zany style and deranged sense of fun.”
For Monroe, the film slots into a run of horror that’s turned her into one of the genre’s most reliable draws. “It Follows,” “Longlegs,” and now a Victorian black comedy about a psychopathic governess — each one a different flavor of dread, each one built around a Monroe performance that refuses to be the most obvious thing in the room. “Victorian Psycho” is rated R for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material and hits theaters September 25.
