Victorian Psycho (2026 | United Kingdom | 102 minutes | Zachary Wigon)
From the title alone, you might assume that Victorian Psycho is something like Patrick Bateman in Middlemarch, but that story’s already been told. It’s called Wuthering Heights.
While Victorian Psycho is not not a Victorian-era homage to Bret Easton Ellis’s hilarious novel American Psycho (and its film adaptation by the feminist filmmaker Mary Harron), the comparison also falls apart in one very crucial respect: it’s nowhere near as funny or clever.
Ellis’s novel, almost certainly the funniest book I’ve ever read, is funny not because of the violence but because of the obsessive precision of his language in crafting the anxious, consumer-driven world of a mid-1980s financial-sector worker, down to describing every article of clothing a person is wearing. Patrick Bateman cannot distinguish the essential from the trivial, whereas Winifred Notty is a violent sociopath in Victorian England out for revenge.
That’s not to say Victorian Psycho is without merit, or that I didn’t enjoy it, just that it fails in comparison to the work it so deliberately invokes.
Victorian Psycho is adapted from Virginia Feito’s 2025 novel, even though the screenplay was already written, A24 had acquired the distribution rights, and Margaret Qualley had been cast as Winifred Notty months before the book was published. That’s very Ben Mezrich.
Now that the film is finished (it premiered at Cannes earlier this year and is now receiving a wide release), A24 and Margaret Qualley are out, and Bleecker Street and Maika Monroe are in. Are we better off with Monroe instead of Qualley? Almost certainly not, but Maika Monroe does bring her own charm and sense of derangement to the Winifred Notty part.
Set in 1858, Victorian Psycho follows Winifred, a governess hired by the privileged and awful Pounds family to educate their children, Andrew and Drusilla, at their country estate, Ensor House. She has a resume that’s impressive on paper, but it omits the carnage previously left in her wake. Holding on to a dangerous secret, her arrival at Ensor House does little to improve her behavior.
I did enjoy Victorian Psycho largely for the acting. Not just Maika Monroe but Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson are memorably as the Pounds patriarch and matriarch. Thomasin McKenzie is also memorable, playing a servant who befriends Winifred, a mistake her kindly nature predictably invites.
And though it’s not Bret Easton Ellis, Victorian Psycho does have some clever moments, particularly as a satire of Victorian manners and sensibilities. There’s a scene involving a mummy that I thought was especially well done for the casual way it treats an utterly absurd situation.
Victorian Psycho is an entertaining enough exercise in bad behavior, even if its ambitions exceed its wit.
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Victorian Psycho opens in theaters on Friday, November 13.