Maika Monroe Is Terrifying in Victorian Psycho Teaser

Maika Monroe has made a career out of making audiences deeply, viscerally uncomfortable — and her latest role looks like it might be her most unsettling yet. The first teaser trailer for Victorian Psycho arrived on May 21, the same day the gothic horror film made its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, and it is exactly as unhinged as the title promises.

Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a young governess who arrives at the sweeping, remote Ensor House in 1858 to teach the children of the well-to-do Pounds family. It doesn’t take long before staff begin to mysteriously disappear — and suspicion starts circling the eccentric new arrival. The teaser makes little effort to hide where that suspicion leads. Set to the jarring, anachronistic punk needle drop “Throw Yourself to the Sword” by Die Spitz, it builds around a genuinely chilling monologue Monroe delivers to her young charges.

“What is the most important thing in life? Knowing good from evil,” Monroe intones in voiceover. “But what is evil? Can you touch it? Can you smell it? Can you taste it on your tongue? Can you feel it rolling around inside you? Squeezing hard?”

It’s the kind of line that makes you want to check that your doors are locked.

From ‘It Follows’ to Period Horror — Monroe’s Darkest Role Yet

Monroe has been building toward something like this for a decade. She broke through in the slow-burn nightmare of It Follows, then cemented her scream queen status opposite Nicolas Cage in Neon’s Longlegs last year. But by her own account, Winifred Notty is a different beast entirely.

“It terrified me,” Monroe told THR’s David Canfield in an exclusive first-look interview. “I knew that it would be the hardest role that I have ever done — and so incredibly different from anything I’ve ever done.”

“There’s always a little part of me in roles that I do, something that I can ground it with or connect it with within my own personal life — but this role was really a departure from that,” she continued. “It was working from the ground up, creating this character where I couldn’t rely on my own self. It really, in the most magical way, took a toll on me. I felt it every day.”

Director Zachary Wigon says Monroe’s particular screen quality was exactly what drew him to casting her. “One of the interesting things about Maika is her incredible ability to have a restrained, contained intensity on screen,” he told Variety. “There’s this sense with her screen persona that there’s something very intense going on behind her eyes, in her head, that you’re not able to track. Instinctively, I felt it would be compelling to cast her as a serial killer, because we’re so curious about what’s going on in their head.”

Winifred, Wigon explains, is a character defined by a brutal paradox. “She will never belong — and she will never stop wanting to belong,” he said of the governess who is always an outsider desperate to be an insider. That tension, he suggests, is at the heart of everything.

A ‘Demented’ Vision — and a Bumpy Road to Get Here

The film is Wigon’s third feature, following his 2014 debut The Heart Machine and the claustrophobic 2022 two-hander Sanctuary, which starred Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley. It was actually Qualley who was originally attached to lead Victorian Psycho — she’d even been publicly working on her British accent in preparation for the role. Then, just days before production was set to begin in early 2025, she had to exit the project. Monroe stepped in, the film shot in Ireland, and the rest is Cannes history.

The screenplay was adapted by Virginia Feito from her own 2025 novel of the same name — Feito is also known for her debut Mrs. March — and Wigon says discovering her unpublished manuscript was what pulled him into the project in the first place. “What really struck me was every page was filled with this incredible intensity and anger,” he said. “The novel changed forms a little bit from that early draft that I read to what she ended up publishing. But the anger and the intensity of it was so acute that the experience was like being gripped on every page. At the same time, it was really funny. I’d never read anything like it before.”

That tonal mix — horror, black comedy, empathy, outrage — is intentional. Wigon’s word for the film is “demented.” “It’s a big tent,” he said. “Demented encompasses scary, but also funny and outrageous.” Getting the audience to root for a murderous protagonist, he says, comes down to keeping them locked inside her subjectivity: “Even if you are not rooting for them, when you recognize how aberrant and awful their behavior is, if you’re connected to their subjectivity, you understand why, to some degree, they feel the way they feel.”

The film has already been rated R by the MPA for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material — which tracks with everything the teaser is selling.

Alongside Monroe, the cast includes Thomasin McKenzie as a nursemaid at Ensor House who befriends the new governess, Ruth Wilson, Jason Isaacs, Jacobi Jupe, Amy De Bhrun, and Evie Templeton as Miss Drusilla Pounds — described as “the picture of a young lady-in-the-making, but inwardly, she carries an intensity and darkness beyond her years.” The film is produced by Dan Kagan, Liz Siegal, and Sebastien Raybaud — the same producing team behind Longlegs — alongside Wigon, with Bleecker Street handling U.S. distribution.

Victorian Psycho arrives in American theaters this fall. If the teaser is any indication, Winifred Notty is going to be living rent-free in a lot of heads between now and then.