'Victorian Psycho' Review: Maika Monroe Flips the Final Girl Script

Maika Monroe plays the killer, not the victim, in "Victorian Psycho," Zachary Wigon's 90-minute adaptation of Virginia Feito's novel, which premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Bleecker Street will release the film in theaters on Friday, November 13.

Monroe, the established scream queen of "It Follows," "The Guest" and "Longlegs," switches sides here. Her Winifred Notty, a Victorian-era governess, heads to a sprawling Yorkshire estate to teach the children of Mr. and Mrs. Pounds, played by Jason Isaacs and a sneaky-great Ruth Wilson. "This won't be like the other times," Winifred tells herself — a line that winks hard, since just about everyone she has ever met is dead.

Feito adapted her own book, which the review recommends alongside her previous novel, "Mrs. March." The film keeps Winifred's prim voiceover, through which Monroe delivers the heroine's self-assessment: Winifred is the sanest person she knows. Dead eyes, a rictus grin she works to fix in place, and clumsy imitations of the humans around her complete the portrait.

What does the film actually deliver?

Wigon and Feito don't soft-pedal the title's promise. Winifred kills her way through the icky — gardeners, a nurse played by Thomasin McKenzie, and, yes, at least one baby. Editors Dustin Chow and Lance Edmands cut the murder scenes elegantly and for maximum gasps: blood flows, then spurts, then pools. Sometimes it lands on Winifred's face or collar. She moves on, grimly and happily.

Cinematographer Nico Aguilar matches that energy. He shoots in and through keyholes, swings his camera like a clock pendulum, and briefly adopts the perspective of something swallowed as it travels into Winifred's belly. The review calls the result playful, gross, and dark enough that "you can't help but laugh."

Winifred frays as the story goes. She believes she belongs to the Pounds family, dreams and nightmares merge, and she's haunted by the family's wild-boar mascot — particularly in an ever-morphing tapestry. She also can't stop sneaking in to stare at people while they sleep.

Where does the adaptation stumble?

The book is slim, and at a tight 90 minutes, some changes are smart while others dilute the novel's darkest impulses. Gone is the countdown to a Christmas massacre that frames the book; gone, in fact, is the whole Christmas massacre. Feito's script builds to a different celebration and cuts many of the novel's most colorful supporting characters along the way.

The bigger problem is the ending. The final event reads as a battle of Winifred's wills, but the review asks: what wills? By implying Winifred isn't fully on board with the evil she commits, Wigon's film bisects her spirit — a choice the reviewer finds especially odd given that Feito made it with her own material.

"Well, that's not my 'Victorian Psycho' — and she's not," the review notes of the tempered heroine. For fans of the novel's unrepentant star, that may rankle, because for much of the film Monroe is even better than the source. The verdict, in the reviewer's own pun: audiences "would have loved for this one to go full, ahem, boar."

The film's appeal rests on how far it lets its psycho go; on that measure, it lands one decisive stop short.