Maika Monroe plays eccentric governess Winifred Notty in Victorian Psycho, set in an aristocratic English country house around 1858. Winifred arrives at Ensor House to take a governess job after her previous charges died under mysterious circumstances. Mr. Pounds and Mrs. Pounds demand obedience and secrecy, while Winifred teaches unconventional ideas to the children, including statements about pain and a shocking act involving a baby deer. Despite assurances that nothing will happen again, darkness inside Winifred persists and suggests further violence. The film adapts Monroe’s novel, using many lines directly from the book, and features a psychotic, witty first-person narrator delivered through Monroe’s voiceover.
"Monroe embodies eccentric governess Winifred Notty - if you consider spree murdering "eccentric" - with a hair-trigger twitchiness, tilting her neck and pulling one side of her mouth to indicate her character's true feelings when propriety demands that she keep silent. And given that the story takes place in an aristocratic English country house circa 1858, there's a lot of propriety to contend with here."
"Winifred has come to the handsome stone residence known as Ensor House in order to take a job as a governess. Her last two sets of upper-class charges perished under mysterious circumstances, but the harrumphing Mr. Pounds (Jason Isaacs) and his casually cruel wife Mrs. Pounds (Ruth Wilson) don't need to know that. As long as the children can be frightened into behaving, and don't tell their parents about some of her more unconventional teachings - "all living things are constantly in pain," she tells young Andrew (Jacobi Jupe) and Drissila (Evie Templeton) after fatally stabbing a baby deer in front of them - everything should be fine, and"it" won't happen again."
"Except the darkness inside Winifred is very much alive, and all but assures that "it" will. Screenwriter Virginia Feito adapts her own novel for the film version of Victorian Psycho, and some of the movie's most delicious lines are taken straight from the book. Although they have nothing to do with each other in terms of plot, one thing Victorian Psycho does share with Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho is a first-person narrator who's not just unreliable, she's psychotic."
"She's also very witty, and Monroe narrates much of the film in voiceover as Winifred, delivering the effortlessly word"
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