The American scream queen never seems quite at home as a maniacal English governess in Zachary Wigon's flimsy genre hybrid, which reveals all its cards upfront and has nowhere to go from there.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
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Helen Sloan/Courtesy Bleecker Street The governess is thoroughly ungoverned in “Victorian Psycho,” a grisly ostensible horror comedy from director Zachary Wigon that’s neither frightening nor funny enough to pass muster — and not quite outrageous enough to garner the kind of notoriety it’s aiming for, either. A shot of lurid genre energy that at least provided some tonal contrast at the tail end of a generally tasteful Un Certain Regard program in Cannes, the film stars a miscast Maika Monroe as an unhinged young woman hired by a wealthy family in rural 19th-century England to raise and educate their young son (and daughter, they add grudgingly). It doesn’t take long to discover she’s pretty much the anti-Mary Poppins, or maybe just the antichrist — likelier to recommend a spoonful of cyanide to make the medicine go down.
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