The Governess Who Never Stopped Smiling: Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho Takes Cannes

Some of the most enjoyable screenings at Cannes this year came from the Un Certain Regard section, and few were as gleefully wicked as Victorian Psycho. Directed by Zachary Wigon and written by Spanish novelist Virginia Feito, adapting her own 2025 novel, the film premiered on 21 May 2026 and ended its first screening with a standing ovation.

A governess with a secret

The year is 1858. Winifred Notty, played by Maika Monroe, arrives at Ensor House, a remote gothic manor, to take charge of the family’s children. She is polite, eccentric and impeccably composed. Soon after her arrival, members of the household staff start to disappear, and the owners of the house begin to suspect that their new governess is not what she seems.

The cast around Monroe is a gallery of British period-drama talent. Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson play Mr and Mrs Pounds, the masters of the house, while Thomasin McKenzie appears as Ms Lamb. Jacobi Jupe and Evie Templeton play the Pounds children, Andrew and Drusilla.

From the page to the screen

Feito, born in Madrid, built her international reputation with Mrs March, a novel about a woman unravelling behind a respectable façade. Victorian Psycho takes that idea back to the nineteenth century and makes it bloodier. Writing the screenplay herself, she keeps the novel’s dry, macabre humour and its eye for the absurd rituals of the upper class.

Wigon stages the story first as a classic upstairs-downstairs drama, then lets it tip into gothic horror and black comedy. His camera moves restlessly and finds strange angles in the corridors of the manor, and the film was shot in Ireland, whose houses and landscapes give it a damp, convincing chill.

A comedy of manners in which the manners are the first thing to die.

Monroe’s ferocious turn

Reviews from Cannes were mixed on the film’s ambitions but warm about its lead. Monroe, best known for genre landmarks such as It Follows and Longlegs, plays Winifred with a smile that never wavers, finding comedy in every polite sentence. Critics praised the film’s brevity and its sense of fun, while some felt that its satire of the British aristocracy stays on the surface and that its finale raises questions it does not answer.

On review aggregators the film landed in positive but divided territory, with most critics agreeing on one point: it is an enjoyably blood-soaked ride built around a performance that holds everything together.

What comes next

Produced by Anton and Traffic, Victorian Psycho runs 102 minutes. It will be released in the United States by Bleecker Street on 13 November 2026, and in the United Kingdom and Ireland by True Brit Entertainment. For Spanish audiences, it is also a reminder of how far Feito’s voice now travels: from a novel written in English by a Madrid-born author to a premiere in the official selection at Cannes.