By John Corrado
The title of Victorian Psycho, the enjoyable new dark horror comedy directed by filmmaker and film critic Zachary Wigon (Sanctuary), refers to Winifred Notty (Maika Monroe).
Miss Notty, her name clearly intended as a play on words, is a young woman who is hired as the new governess at Ensor House. The year is 1858, and her job is to look after Andrew (Jacobi Jupe) and Drusilla (Evie Templeton), the children of Mr. and Mrs. Pounds (Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson).
Miss Notty is instructed to make sure the boy is ready for boarding school, while being told outright that the girl’s education does not matter so much to the aristocratic Victorian family, who are more concerned with their own societal standing. So much so that they’ve barely even taken the time to look into the shady history of their new governess.
Miss Notty is a strange, eccentric figure, who arrives under mysterious circumstances around what happened to the previous children in her care. She tells the Pounds children odd things, and has a not so hidden dark side that she calls “Fred” (a “Mr. Hyde,” if you will) that soon starts to reveal itself. She also develops a friendship with Miss Lamb (a delightful Thomasin McKenzie), the naive young nurse looking after the youngest member of the family, who somehow doesn’t suspect her new confidante might be a psychopathic killer.
In many ways, Victorian Psycho plays like the gonzo parody of a Robert Eggers movie. The film delivers the Olde English dialogue and Gothic touches, but laced with sick humour. It’s a balance that can leave us scratching our heads at first trying to figure out precisely what tone Wigon is going for, but it’s pretty clearly intended to be tongue-in-cheek. It’s a horror movie by way of Victorian-era satire, with Monroe’s murderous mad woman Miss Notty serving as an incendiary figure to upend polite society.
Wigon, working from a screenplay by writer Virginia Feito who is adapting her own book for the screen, does show off some stylish directorial touches. This includes a few interesting filmmaking choices with how he presents the grand finale, adding some almost avant garde flourishes to the expected bloodshed. While editors Dustin Chow and Lance Edmands do a good job with it, it’s also debatable whether or not these choices entirely work, or make the presentation somewhat needlessly confusing to watch.
Sure, Victorian Psycho runs a little long at 102 minutes, and the story does threaten to get a bit repetitive in places. But the film’s sense of style, including cinematographer Nico Aguilar’s almost Yorgos Lanthimos-inspired camerawork, keeps it entertaining to watch, with the narrative also being broken up into amusingly titled chapters.
At the centre of it all is Maika Monroe, who really is the reason to see this film. Already a horror icon for her performances in The Guest, It Follows and Longlegs, this is a role that allows her to really let loose and go increasingly unhinged, chewing up the screen in the best way as her Miss Notty unleashes acid-tongued barbs, deranged behaviour, and plenty of violence. If you can appreciate dark humour, Wigon’s film is a lot of fun to watch, but it mainly serves as a solid showcase for Monroe, who fully embraces the titular role as, well, a Victorian Psycho.
