Victorian Psycho (2026): Maika Monroe's Gothic Horror, and Is It Scary?

Victorian Psycho premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2026, in the Un Certain Regard section. Bleecker Street holds US distribution and set a wide theatrical release for September 25, 2026. True Brit Entertainment will release it in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The film runs 90 minutes and is rated R for brief sexual material and strong bloody violence. Zachary Wigon directs, after his earlier features The Heart Machine and Sanctuary. The project changed shape during development: Margaret Qualley was attached to the lead early on, and Maika Monroe replaced her before filming. Virginia Feito wrote the screenplay herself, adapting her own novel.

In 1858, a young governess named Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House, a remote gothic manor, to tutor the two children of the wealthy Pounds family. She presents herself as the model Victorian governess. Beneath that performance she is a killer, and as she settles into the household, the staff around her begin to disappear.

The film uses its period setting for satire as much as for horror. Feito's story turns the tidy, respectable image of the Victorian upper class against itself, letting Winifred expose the cruelty and hypocrisy under the manners. This summary stays at the level of the premise. The story builds to a reveal in its final stretch that reviews have been careful not to give away, and we keep this page spoiler-free.

Victorian Psycho is based on the novel of the same name by Virginia Feito, published on February 4, 2025 by Liveright. It was Feito's second novel, after Mrs. March in 2021. The book is narrated by Winifred herself across the months leading up to Christmas, and it was widely reviewed as a sharp, blackly funny portrait of a Victorian psychopath.

Feito also wrote the screenplay, so the adaptation comes from the author rather than an outside writer. Readers of the novel tend to single out its narrating voice and its final turn, and one of the open questions going into the film is how closely Wigon's version follows the book, especially its ending. We will note where the film and the novel diverge once we have seen it, and will keep any spoilers off this page.

The most argued-about thing about Victorian Psycho out of Cannes was its tone. It is built as a horror comedy, and reviewers disagreed sharply about how well it works as either. Some praised it as vicious and blackly funny, and a showcase for Maika Monroe at her best. Others, including Variety and RogerEbert.com, found it stuck between registers, neither frightening enough to land as horror nor funny enough to land as comedy.

That split is exactly the kind of question Watch Darkly is built to answer, because our scores separate Fear from the rest of what a film is doing. A movie can be low on Fear and still be worth watching for its atmosphere, its gore, or its overall craft, and a horror comedy is where that distinction matters most. We have not scored Victorian Psycho yet, because we score films only after watching them. Once we have, the Fear, Gore, Atmosphere, and Intensity numbers will be on the film page, so you can see how scary it actually is rather than how it is being sold.

For content, the film is rated R for brief sexual material and strong bloody violence, so whatever the debate over how frightening it is, it is not a bloodless one.

Maika Monroe built her horror reputation playing the hunted. She was the target of the following curse in It Follows and the FBI agent closing in on a killer in Longlegs. Victorian Psycho puts her on the other side of that, as the predator rather than the final girl, and the early reviews treat the role as a departure and a highlight.

The supporting cast is strong for a film this size. Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson play the master and mistress of the house, Thomasin McKenzie plays another young woman in the household, and Evie Templeton plays one of the children in Winifred's charge. Wigon comes to it from smaller, tightly controlled chamber pieces like Sanctuary, and Victorian Psycho is his largest canvas so far.