If you liked the book, you’ll love ''Victorian Psycho'' The film was presented in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and stars Maika Monroe

In 2026, Maika Monroe starred in an adaptation of one of Colleen Hoover’s books, the romance author whose most talked-about screen adaptation had been It Ends With Us with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. In the film, titled Reminders of Him, the actress played a young mother who ended up in prison for a car accident in which her daughter’s father was killed, and who returns to the same town she had left behind, where she will form a special bond with the man’s best friend, Tyriq Withers, known for I Know What You Did Last Summer and Him.

A film in which it was strange to see her: among the new acclaimed Scream Queens of American horror, Monroe came from a past made up of monsters that serve as metaphors for sexually transmitted diseases in It Follows, and more recently from her performance as a psychic police officer in Longlegs: which is why she seems much more at ease in Victorian Psycho, presented in preview at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard section.

Another adaptation, but this time from the novel of the same name by Virginia Feito: a horror and gothic comedy in which its protagonist, the governess Winifred Notty, is described as a bloodthirsty Mary Poppins, although instead of being set in London in 1906, the story takes place in the countryside in 1853, at the service of Ensor House.

Although in the film adaptation, as can happen, some ideas or events are revised or modified, the atmosphere of Feito’s book remains impeccably intact even in its big-screen version; perhaps because the novel was adapted for the screen by the author herself, whose work was then matched by director Zachary Wigon’s vision without affecting the spirit of the story. A fidelity, then, not so much to the text, but to what is described and conveyed about its protagonist. The darkness that lies in the deepest, yet at the same time most primal, part of her, and that in the film takes on a kind of electric representation that makes it clear to the viewer from the very beginning that sooner or later it will explode.

Monroe, for her part, proved to be a choice perfectly suited to the mood of Victorian Psycho, with an aura that manages to reconcile Winifred Notty’s restlessness with her total inability to conform to the labels required by her role, let alone by life itself. She is bizarre and dazed, a loose cannon hiding behind the façade the young woman puts on to win the favor of the Pounds family, to whom she offers her services. With that note of brutality that emerges from the pages of the first-person book and that, both in the novel and in the film, does not mainly lie in what the protagonist says or thinks, but in the unpredictability of her actions, which are quick, unexpected, and fatal.

There is an ironic streak in the horrific soul of Wigon’s work, with the sharp lines exchanged throughout the dialogues by all the excellent protagonists, including the heads of the family played by Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson, Thomasin McKenzie’s maid, and the very young Jacobi Jupe, whom it is a pleasure to see again after he played William Shakespeare’s son in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet.

But it is especially in her expression, somewhere between dazed and imperturbable, that the greatest source of amusement in Maika Monroe’s performance lies — or, as Winifred Notty is keen to remind us, the most sinful person she knows. A film whose only small flaw is that it does not quite take that extra step often needed in the transition from book to cinema, but it is certainly a faithful reinterpretation, able to be appreciated by fans of the novel while also entertaining those who will discover Victorian Psycho purely as viewers.