Maika Monroe may have starred in many iconic horror films over the past ten years, since her debut in He follows to its recent box office smash Long legsbut no amount of scream queen credits can prepare her for the gory horror Victorian psyche.
“It terrified me. I knew it was going to be the hardest role I’d ever done — and incredibly different from anything I’d ever done,” says the Santa Barbara native. “There’s always a little piece of me in the roles I play, something I can draw on or relate to in my personal life – but this role was really a departure from that. It was working from the ground up, creating this character where I couldn’t rely on myself. It really affected me, in a very magical way. I felt that every day.”
The film takes place in 1858 and was adapted by Virginia Vito from her own novel. Victorian psyche Monroe plays Winifred Naughty, a privileged young woman who arrives at the old Gothic mansion of the wealthy Pounds family, claiming to be the house’s new governess. She is eager to please them, but is reluctantly welcomed by the mother and patriarch (Ruth Wilson and Jason Isaacs), and is tasked with watching over and teaching their children. She reaches out to her fellow employee at the house, the kindly Mrs. Lamb (Thomasin MacKenzie), and expresses her courageous determination to adapt.
“It’s wonderful to see an outsider who wants so badly to be an insider that it’s simply impossible,” says director Zachary Wiggon.haven). “It’s a very profound paradox. She will never belong — and she will never stop wanting to belong.”
These irreconcilable facts are just one of the reasons why things go so wrong within the Pound family. People disappear. Blood begins to splatter the garden, hallway and kitchen. This isn’t just some cranky employee who’s slowly losing her grip on her job. “I remember reading the manuscript of the novel, and wondering, ‘What is this woman going to do?’” Wigeon says. “There was an interesting visual language in the depiction of this woman losing her grip…. What was so energizing about it from an aesthetic perspective was doing something that was set in 1858, but in a contemporary style.”
The project came primarily to Wigon, who had been collaborating with Feito on an unrelated script before informing him of her then-imminent next book. They focused on speeding up the screen capture process Victorian psyche It quickly sold the rights to A24, with Margaret Qualley attached to star. This setup has gradually collapsed. “I’ve changed distributors, it comes with the territory of the fickle nature of independent filmmaking,” says Wiggon when asked how the project evolved from an A24 cut into a new package titled Monroe and distributed by Bleecker Street. “We are very pleased with all the support Bleeker has given me to bring the film into the world.”
What attracted him to Monroe, who is set to have a big year in 2026 and is riding high on commercial success Reminder of it? “It has this very intense internal quality, where you can tell that the gears are whirring and that there’s a lot going on in the character’s head,” Wigeon says. “I thought it would be perfect for a serial killer because we always wonder what’s going on in their heads — that’s why the whole reality TV industry and so on exists trying to understand this phenomenon.”
To prepare for portraying a 19th-century serial killer, Monroe went through extensive training, zooming in each week with Wigeon to complete a set blocking. She needed to master the English accent, and modify her mannerisms and body movements. She suggested painfully visible false teeth. One of the film’s most memorable scenes requires Monroe to be covered in fake blood in the cold for an elaborate, technocratic shot at 4:30 in the morning.
In short, Monroe had to go all in. “I memorized every scene because you play the script so many times — it was ingrained in my head, and I can still read it for years to come,” Monroe says. “This might be the character I miss the most.” It helped that both of her main actors kept her off balance.
Isaac’s slippery Mr. Pounds shows a confusing interest in Winifred. “Your eyes are completely glued to him,” Wiggon says of his wife, “and he is completely unpredictable, and his choices are always as unusual as his wife.” White lotus alum. Meanwhile, Wilson plays Isaac’s wife as a kind of desperate agitator. “Some of my favorite scenes I’ve shot throughout my career were with Ruth,” Monroe says. “Sometimes, backstage, I would watch her fascinated by what she was doing – and actually find her role incredibly challenging.”
Then there is the friendship with Mrs. Lamb, which is a rare instance of seeing Winifred and another person able to enjoy each other’s company. “Most of the time, people look at it with disgust and don’t understand it,” Monroe says. “For the first time, you feel this much connection with someone.” In these interactions, Winifred’s characterization becomes more complex—she is a deranged killer, yes, but she is after something relatively human. The tension then becomes: What happens if you get what you’re looking for, and what if you don’t?
The film’s horror-comedy tone came to Wigeon only after the initial script stages. “It’s a bit like engineering at first,” he says. “It’s more about the structural mathematics of ‘How are we going to fit this story and how are these scenes going to be arranged?’” That led to a single word description that Monroe says defines his overall style on the show: “Crazy.”
“When I first talked to people about it, I said, ‘This is kind of manic madness,’” Wigeon says. Monroe’s presence helped matters: “Every time we got into the setting, it was like the character Mika was in a vice grip. She never really left. I was always there. It was like a magnet. It was amazing to watch.”
Wigeon adds that the post-production aspect was straightforward, if only because he laid out the film so meticulously before filming even began. He had access to the castle where they fired in preparation. “We pre-visualized everything in the shot list before we started shooting, so in a situation like this, the coverage is almost non-existent,” he says. “You don’t shoot coverage in these situations because you want to maximize what you can get stylistically. If you have a more sophisticated or complicated visual idea that will come at the expense of coverage, that’s okay because you shot it.”
For her part, Munro saw it all come together in the final edit. “Zach had certain images and certain shots, and you shoot it like, ‘This looks great, I hope it works, it looks great’ — and after seeing it all come together, I was really blown away,” she says. “As with most actors, it’s always strange to watch yourself, but the beautiful thing about this project is that it was so different for me – that little part of me was able to pull myself out of it.”
In fact, it’s not just the false teeth – Monroe may have scared you before on screen, but she was never like this.
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Victorian psyche It will premiere on May 21 at the Cannes Film Festival. Stay tuned for more Cannes 2026 screenings and premieres.
