Victorian Psycho: Mary Poppins finally had enough (horror movie trailer).
The second trailer for Victorian Psycho has arrived, bringing Maika Monroe to a remote country house as the sort of governess whose employment references probably consist of several hastily abandoned addresses.
Set in 1858, the film follows Winifred Notty, an eccentric young woman employed to educate the children of Ensor House. She is expected to teach them good manners, oversee their lessons and refrain from violently reducing the household staff. Two of these duties appear to interest her more than the other.
Winifred is played by Monroe, who has already demonstrated in It Follows, Watcher and Longlegs that she can detect something appalling approaching from the far end of a room. This time she is the appalling thing, which must make a refreshing change after years spent looking worriedly over her shoulder.
The trailer presents her as a smiling bundle of repressed fury wrapped in black Victorian clothing. She arrives at the isolated Gothic manor and meets her employers, Mr and Mrs Pounds, played by Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson. They appear to regard Winifred as peculiar but potentially useful. This was apparently sufficient due diligence when hiring someone to live in your home and exercise unsupervised authority over your children.
Her charges are Andrew and Drusilla, played by Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton. Winifred wastes little time explaining that she dislikes children, although she appears equally unimpressed by adults, servants, social convention and the continued circulation of blood inside the human body.
As members of the household begin disappearing, suspicion settles upon the new governess. Admittedly, this is not the most taxing mystery ever placed before an audience. If people start vanishing shortly after a sinister stranger arrives carrying an axe and an expression of private amusement, one need not immediately summon Sherlock Holmes.
Thomasin McKenzie also stars as Miss Lamb, another governess whose very presence suggests that Ensor House may have a troubling staff-retention problem. Perhaps there is an unusually active recruitment agency nearby. Perhaps the previous governesses are beneath the rhododendrons.
Victorian Psycho is based on Virginia Feito’s 2025 novel, which follows Winifred through the months leading up to Christmas. Feito adapted her own book for the screen, preserving its mixture of Gothic horror, black comedy and impolite thoughts about the Victorian social order. Christmas at Ensor House promises fewer carols than usual and considerably more scrubbing of floorboards.
The film is directed by Zachary Wigon, whose previous feature Sanctuary confined Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley to a hotel room for an entertainingly vicious battle of power and manipulation. He has now exchanged modern luxury for candlelit corridors, but the interest in people tormenting one another appears to have survived the move intact.
The new trailer leans enthusiastically into the contrast between Victorian propriety and Winifred’s homicidal urges. Everyone around her is concerned with posture, obedience and maintaining the appearance of civilisation. Winifred seems more interested in discovering how much civilisation can be removed with a suitably heavy household object.
That makes her part of the long and honourable Gothic tradition of strangers arriving at large houses where the owners have mistaken wealth for safety. Ensor House has shadowy corridors, suspicious noises and enough candles to keep an occult supplier comfortably profitable. The family might have saved themselves considerable trouble by moving into a semi-detached house near a well-lit railway station.
The pleasure of the premise lies in knowing almost immediately that Winifred is dangerous while watching everyone else struggle to reach the same conclusion. She is not a misunderstood innocent confronted by supernatural forces. She is the force, albeit one expected to teach geography between acts of carnage.
Monroe appears to be enjoying the opportunity enormously. Her Winifred can smile sweetly while giving the impression that she is mentally measuring someone for a grave. The performance also allows her a darkly comic streak quite different from the haunted restraint of many of her earlier horror roles. There are only so many films in which one can flee an unstoppable evil before wondering whether it might be more enjoyable to play the unstoppable evil.
Isaacs and Wilson are splendid casting as the wealthy couple who sense that something is wrong but may be too embedded in their own assumptions to recognise it. Victorian class hierarchy demanded that servants remain invisible. Unfortunately, that becomes inconvenient when one of them is making the other servants invisible in a much more permanent fashion.
The film received its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where it introduced festival audiences to Winifred’s particular approach to childcare. It runs for a brisk 90 minutes, which should be ample time for lessons, supper and the systematic collapse of the household.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we approve of any Gothic horror which understands that a grand country house is merely a beautifully decorated trap with poor lighting. Victorian Psycho looks gruesome, knowingly funny and gloriously ill-mannered. One suspects the Pounds family will eventually regret failing to request a DBS check, despite those not being invented for another century and a half.
Victorian Psycho is directed by Zachary Wigon and stars Maika Monroe, Jason Isaacs, Ruth Wilson, Thomasin McKenzie, Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton. It is due in cinemas in autumn 2026, with its United States release set for 25 September.
