‘Victorian Psycho’ is Delightfully Obscene and Showcases Maika Monroe at Her Very Best [Cannes 2026 Review]

For a prestige period piece with impeccable attention to detail, Zachary Wigon‘s Victorian Psycho is a surprisingly entertaining, low-lift experience. The nasty mayhem that quickly bursts through the gates stays simmering in the realm of fun thanks to the film’s refusal to take itself or its form too seriously. Even life and death themselves are things us human types tend to take far too seriously, unable to fathom the planet without us, individually or as a whole. Victorian Psycho is prepared to imagine it. Life is a low-rent commodity and can be expelled without much consideration or regret. There’s a wonderfully nihilistic sense here that, like ants or single-cell organisms under a microscope, humans, too, shouldn’t be taken too seriously. And that our suffering, joys, lives, and deaths are just casual events no one will remember. So why not muck things up a little?

The setup here concerns Winifred Notty (Maika Monroe), who arrives at Ensor House, a remote gothic manor on the Yorkshire Moors, where the Pounds family has hired her to look after their two children. She seems generally poised, somewhat soft-spoken, and at least outwardly suited to the role. But it’s mere moments into the film when Winifred admits directly to the audience that she’s got some self-work to do. And then the children she instructs are just as quick to bear witness to her eccentric sensibilities, tied to her powerful and kinda silly deep internal desire to perpetuate carnage and harm. Uh oh…

Thankfully, Mr. and Mrs. Pounds (Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson) see no surface reason for concern, and the household carries on as it always has. Then a member of the staff disappears. Then another. The remaining help begin to whisper, the children behave in ways that no longer feel like simple mischief, and the master and mistress of the house find themselves wondering far too late.