Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty in Victorian Psycho, and has now put the film’s 1858 setting and blood-soaked logic under a sharper spotlight. The review treats Winifred’s arrival at Ensor House as the engine of the film, where a governess takes charge of two wealthy children and the household’s rigid order starts to wobble.
Winifred Notty at Ensor House
Virginia Feito wrote the film from her 2025 novel, and Zachary Wigon directs a cast that includes Evie Templeton as Drusilla, Jacobi Jupe as Andrew, Jason Isaacs as Mr. Pounds, Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Pounds, and Thomasin McKenzie as Miss Lamb. The setup is precise: Miss Notty reaches Ensor House in 1858 to take a post caring for Drusilla and Andrew, and the house itself is rendered as a trap more than a refuge.
Jeremy Reed turns Ensor House into a twisty, vulgar, overly ornate home, while Nico Aguilar makes it feel haunted, dark, and spooky by night. That visual pressure matters because the film keeps the action inside one oppressive space, so every hallway, room, and social exchange becomes part of the same tightening system.
Women and the Pounds household
Mr. Pounds wants Miss Notty to get Andrew ready for boarding school next year, and he says Drusilla is at an age where she risks her fertility by overeducation. The review uses that line to frame the household as a place where girls are measured against obedience and reproduction, not curiosity, and where the children’s roles are already fixed before they can choose them.
Drusilla is the older and more clever child, while Andrew sits inside the more obvious path to privilege. That imbalance gives the film its pressure point: Miss Notty enters as a caregiver, but the household’s own rules make the children look like assets being sorted rather than people being raised.
Sanity, violence, and doubt
Winifred Notty introduces herself by saying, "I’m the sanest person I’ve ever met," and the film uses that line as a warning signal rather than a joke. The review says she has recently come off a string of appointments in which the children in her care came to tragic ends, which turns her into both a governess and a danger the audience is asked to track.
The movie often leaves it unclear whether the strange events are real or only in Miss Notty’s head, and that uncertainty is the film’s main mechanism. The violence can be read as literal action, delusion, or something in between, which keeps the story from settling into a neat supernatural answer and forces every scene at Ensor House to carry two meanings at once.
For viewers deciding whether this is just another period horror setup, the review suggests a sharper cut: this is a film about how Victorian order polices women first and explanations second. Maika Monroe leads one of Peacock’s top streaming picks, and here she is being used in a very different register, with the uncertainty around Miss Notty doing the work of the scare.
Maika Monroe’s recent streaming surge shows how firmly she can anchor a title, and Victorian Psycho leans on that same presence while asking viewers to sit with the messier question of how much of Miss Notty’s violence is supernatural, imagined, or deliberately real.
