Victorian Psycho

Bluesky

Horror and comedy can make amicable bedfellows, with success stories including everything from Shaun Of The Dead to Get Out. But the highly mannered and stylised approach taken by director Zachary Wigon and writer Virginia Feito (adapting her own novel) in this tale of the grisly machinations of an unhinged governess feels not so much torn between as a sliced and diced version of the two genres. The ungainly result may deliver some gore but it lacks the tension that ought to underpin it.

"I'm the sanest person I know," declares Winifred Notty (scream queen Maika Monroe, taking a turn as the villain for once) as she arrives at her latest appointment. Ensor House is an isolated gothic pile of a manor complete with lecherous patriarch Mr Pounds (Jason Isaacs), his social climbing wife (Ruth Wilson) and their bratty son Andrew (Jacobi Jupe) and daughter Drusilla (Evie Templeton).

Wigon’s film is arch as a proscenium from the start, with Winifred’s voiceover – a returning feature – setting the oddly accented elevated tone. It’s all too much too soon, immediately establishing her as a wrong ‘un with Nico Aguilar’s.deliberately off kilter camera angles in case we fail to get the message. The best of the humour, which mostly revolves around the idea that Drusilla is there to be tolerated and fertile rather than educated, is reminiscent of that deployed by Whit Stillman in Love & Friendship, but the constant mugging for the camera from the adult cast undercuts it. That these are all excellent actors suggests the fault lies with the director's instructions rather than their skills.

While, with a title like this, murder would never be a surprise, the plot trajectory is all too predictable and familiar. First a gardener, who knows Winifred’s secret history involving missing children, meets a sticky end – what happens to his ear postmortem is one of Wigon’s better flourishes. Then when she strikes up a friendship with timid nursemaid (Thomasin McKenzie, who seems to have wandered in from an entirely more naturalistic and interesting film), the question is how long as she got, rather than, I wonder what will happen?

The production design and costuming are as polished as the family silver but the gloss of the story rubs off too soon leaving an all too dull climax, despite its hallucinatory excesses and lashings of blood.

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