‘Victorian Psycho’ Is in Theaters: Maika Monroe’s Killer Governess, the Reviews, the Box Office Math and Everything We Know
Winifred Notty has finally clocked in. Victorian Psycho , the blood-soaked governess horror-comedy that turned Maika Monroe into a grinning, eye-rolling menace, opened in U.S. theaters on Friday, November 13, through Bleecker Street. It arrives with a 75% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, an R rating earned the messy way, a Cannes premiere behind it and one of the strangest paths to the screen of any horror release this year: a different lead, a different distributor and a different release date were all attached at one point or another.
It also arrives in the middle of a crowded, ghost-heavy weekend, going up against Ti West and Johnny Depp's Ebenezer and the second frame of Godzilla Minus Zero. Below: the trailer, everything confirmed about the release, who made it, how a film that once belonged to A24 and Margaret Qualley ended up with Bleecker Street and Monroe, what the critics are actually saying, and the box office math that will decide whether this weekend counts as a win.
Watch the Trailer
Here's the official trailer from Bleecker Street. Fair warning: the studio's marketing has leaned hard into the film's gleeful nastiness, so the squeamish may want to keep a hand near the pause button.
The Details: What's Confirmed
- Release: In U.S. theaters now, as of Friday, November 13, 2026, from Bleecker Street. Rotten Tomatoes and The Numbers both list it as a wide release.
- International: It opened in Russia on November 12 and in Spain and South Africa on November 13, with Brazil and Mexico following on December 3. True Brit Entertainment handles the UK and Ireland.
- Rating: R, for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material.
- Runtime: The Numbers lists it at 90 minutes, though listings vary.
- Setting: 1858, at a gothic English estate called Ensor House, where a peculiar new governess arrives and the household staff begin to vanish.
- Cast: Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty, Thomasin McKenzie as Ms. Lamb, Jason Isaacs as Mr. Pounds, Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Pounds, Amy De Bhrun as Mrs. Fancey, and Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton as the Pounds children, Andrew and Drusilla.
- Director and writer: Zachary Wigon directs from a screenplay by Virginia Feito, adapting her own 2025 novel.
- Producers: Dan Kagan for Traffic, Sebastien Raybaud for Anton and Wigon himself, in association with Anonymous Content. Anton fully financed the film.
- Behind the camera: Nico Aguilar shot it, Dustin Chow and Lance Edmands cut it and Ariel Marx composed the score.
Photo: Jason Isaacs via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
.jpg){kind=link}
Who's Behind It
Maika Monroe
Monroe has spent a decade building one of the most dependable résumés in modern horror. She broke through in 2014 with a one-two punch of David Robert Mitchell's It Follows , which premiered at Cannes, and Adam Wingard's The Guest. She anchored Chloe Okuno's stalker thriller Watcher in 2022, then played FBI agent Lee Harker opposite Nicolas Cage in Osgood Perkins' Longlegs , which crossed $100 million at the global box office and became 2024's biggest independent release. She is also set to return as Jay Height in They Follow , Neon's It Follows sequel.
What makes Winifred different is that Monroe is finally the threat instead of the target. Nearly all of her famous genre roles are women who watch, listen and survive. Here she gets to be the thing in the house.
Zachary Wigon
Wigon came up as a film critic, writing for Slant, Filmmaker and The Village Voice before directing. His debut feature, the online-romance thriller The Heart Machine , premiered at SXSW in 2014 after a crowdfunding campaign. His second, the two-hander Sanctuary with Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott, premiered at TIFF in 2022, earned strong reviews and was picked up by Neon's Super label. Victorian Psycho is by far his biggest canvas: a period piece, an ensemble and a body count.
Virginia Feito
Feito is a Madrid-born novelist who writes in English. Her 2021 debut, Mrs. March , won Spain's Valencia Negra prize for best novel and was named one of the year's best books by The Times. Victorian Psycho , her second novel, landed in early 2025, which means this adaptation went from bookshelf to Cannes in a little over a year. Having the author write her own screenplay is a big part of why early reviews describe the film's voice as so specific.
The supporting cast
Jason Isaacs, forever Lucius Malfoy to a generation and more recently a standout in The White Lotus , plays the master of the house. Ruth Wilson, whose own gothic credentials include Oz Perkins' ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and the BBC's His Dark Materials , plays his wife. Thomasin McKenzie, who led Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho , plays Ms. Lamb. Young Jacobi Jupe, who was in Hamnet , plays the Pounds son.
Photo: Ruth Wilson by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
The Backstory: A Governess Who Changed Hands Three Times
This movie almost looked very different. Margaret Qualley, Wigon's Sanctuary star, was announced as Winifred in October 2024. Thomasin McKenzie joined in November 2024, and in December 2024 A24 bought U.S. rights. That would have put the film on the same label that turned Hereditary and Talk to Me into events.
By May 2025, all of that had shifted. Qualley was out, Monroe was in and A24 was no longer distributing. Jason Isaacs signed on around the same time. True Brit Entertainment took UK and Ireland rights in July 2025, Bleecker Street grabbed U.S. rights in August 2025 and cameras rolled in Ireland on August 18, 2025.
The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes on May 21, 2026, where Fangoria reported a five-minute standing ovation. Bleecker Street originally set it for September 25. Then, in early August, the studio pushed it to November 13, a date Dread Central called prime awards-season territory. No official reason was given. The cynical read is that it dodged a stacked September; the generous read is that Bleecker thinks Monroe's performance can get noticed in a slower, prestige-heavy month. Along the way the marketing went full gremlin, including the gutted-baby popcorn bucket we covered earlier this month.
How Monroe Built Winifred
The most fun reporting around this release has been about Monroe's face. In an interview with Den of Geek, Wigon said he sent Monroe a video of a forensic psychologist breaking down a Ted Bundy interview, pausing to dissect his tics and expressions. Those conversations, he said, may have been the seed of the physical choices she made. The two then spent Zoom sessions trying out exaggerated, expressionistic faces, and Wigon compared Monroe to a slot machine, cycling through looks until he told her to stop. One eye-roll was the moment he knew they had it.
Monroe also told Den of Geek that Nicolas Cage, her Longlegs co-star and one of her favorite actors, was "a definite influence for this character." Anyone who has seen Cage in Vampire's Kiss will see the family resemblance in the trailer. In a Bleecker Street featurette covered by Dread Central, she added two more touchstones: Jack Nicholson in The Shining and American Psycho. Wigon has framed the film along the same lines, as an antihero's slide into madness with the audience riding shotgun. She has also said the role pushed her well outside her comfort zone, which tracks: this is the opposite of the quiet, internal work that made her a scream queen.
By the Numbers: Reviews and Box Office
Reviews: As of Saturday, November 14, the film sits at 75% on Rotten Tomatoes from 83 reviews. That's down slightly from its Cannes-era 77% on 26 reviews, which is normal as more critics weigh in. The consensus credits Monroe's ferocious lead performance and the film's dark wit. Individual scores are mostly in the "good, not great" lane: 3 out of 4 from the San Jose Mercury News, 3 out of 5 from The Guardian, 6/10 from Screen Rant and 7/10 from But Why Tho.
The complaints are consistent. Screen Rant argued it works best as a string of set pieces and would have benefited from a tighter plot, while praising Monroe as the film's best special effect. But Why Tho felt the narration over-explains the mystery, the supporting cast is underused and the film is less of a slasher than the marketing suggests. Nobody seems to be complaining about the lead.
Box office: Box Office Theory's weekend forecast pegs Victorian Psycho at around $2 million for its opening three days. The competition is a lot bigger. Ebenezer is forecast for roughly $23.5 million from about 3,500 locations after a $1.5 million Thursday preview night, and Godzilla Minus Zero is projected for about $11.8 million in its second weekend. Actual weekend numbers will arrive Sunday.
Analysis: What This Weekend Really Means
Let's be honest about the scale. A $2 million opening would be a rounding error for a studio tentpole, but this isn't one. Victorian Psycho is an Anton-financed indie released by a specialty distributor, and its real business model is longer: a few weeks of theatrical buzz, a strong word-of-mouth tail among genre fans, then a premium digital and streaming life where a Maika Monroe horror title with a memorable hook can play for years.
The fall's other horror releases show how wide the range is right now. Other Mommy has made about $58.9 million domestically, per The Numbers, and over $110 million worldwide on a $19 million budget. Clayface sits near $59.9 million after three weeks. Wicker is at about $21.8 million after 21 days. Victorian Psycho won't touch those numbers out of the gate, and it doesn't need to. The better comparison is Longlegs , which proved that a well-marketed indie with Monroe at its center can break out far past its expected ceiling when fans decide a movie is an event. Bleecker Street's bucket stunt and grisly trailers are a clear bid for that kind of word of mouth.
The timing matters, too. Moving from late September to mid-November took the film out of the Halloween pileup and into a month where horror is scarce. That's smart counterprogramming on paper, but it put it on the same weekend as Ebenezer , a gothic ghost story with Ti West's genre cred and a much bigger rollout. Fans with one movie night this weekend have a real choice to make, and the studio with the bigger ad budget usually wins that fight.
For Monroe, the stakes are less about this weekend and more about range. She has proven she can carry fear. Victorian Psycho is her bid to prove she can carry menace and comedy at the same time, the way Mia Goth did with Pearl. With They Follow on deck, a well-liked villain turn now would make her one of the rare horror stars who can sell both sides of the knife.
For Wigon and Feito, the reviews already settle a lot. A 75% score for a tonally risky, author-adapted period horror-comedy is a good result, and it makes the case that Feito's novels are adaptable. That may help Mrs. March , which was reported in development as a film with Elisabeth Moss back in 2020.
What We Still Don't Know
- The theater count and the actual opening. Bleecker Street's final location count wasn't in the forecasts we saw, and real weekend numbers land Sunday.
- The audience score. Rotten Tomatoes still shows fewer than 50 verified audience ratings, so the Popcornmeter isn't live yet. That number will matter more than the critics' score for its second weekend.
- The home release. No digital or streaming date has been announced.
- The budget. Neither Bleecker Street nor Anton has disclosed one.
Bottom Line
Victorian Psycho is exactly the kind of movie that lives or dies by fan word of mouth: a weird, nasty, funny swing with a lead performance critics seem to agree on, even when they're split on the rest. It won't win the weekend. The real question is whether it becomes the movie horror fans keep telling each other to see through Thanksgiving.
So, are you seeing Victorian Psycho or Ebenezer this weekend? And if you've already seen Monroe's governess, is she a career-best villain or all smile and no story?
Related on The Horror Feed
Header photo: Maika Monroe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
Recent STories
