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(Chicago International Film Festival) VICTORIAN PSYCHO: A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Stabbing Go Down

By. Professor Horror 

 

Victorian novels loved a locked door, and one of their favorite things to put behind it was a woman who had felt too much, said too much, or simply refused to behave. The best-known example is the madwoman in the attic, the furious wife whom Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre hides on the top floor of a respectable house, and whom feminist critics have long read as the angry double of the polite governess downstairs. Virginia Feito’s novel VICTORIAN PSYCHO announces its debt to that tradition in its tagline (“Jane Eyre meets American Psycho”), and the film adaptation (directed by Zachary Wigon with Feito writing the screenplay and Maika Monroe as the governess Winifred Notty) takes the idea one step further. It moves the attic inside her head. Winifred’s crisp accent, porcelain face, and flawless manners belong to the governess, who was hired to be tidy and quiet and to ask for nothing. However, the film is narrated by a voiceover that belongs to someone more sinister...someone who has been locked away behind all that composure and has plenty to say. 

The governess is on display from the first frame...and it isn’t reassuring. Winifred’s porcelain complexion and fixed, cold dead stare give her the look of a creepy doll. She arrives at Ensor House with a letter of employment in hand, but the house is in no hurry to welcome her, and she is pointed toward the servants’ entrance like a delivery nobody ordered. The costumes are black and severe, funereal in a way that suggests the family is mourning a death that hasn’t happened yet. The rooms deliver everything a period piece promises, with rich wallpaper, heavy tapestries, and furniture that looks as though it disapproves of you. All of that polish matters because a house this devoted to appearances is exactly the kind of place that needs a locked door, and exactly the kind of place where blood on the wallpaper counts as the rudest thing a guest can do. Winifred’s job is to blend into that surface, so she wears her manners like a uniform and holds them there for as long as the family can stand it.

The family itself is a fine argument for keeping a few doors shut. Mr. Pounds (Jason Isaacs) is an avid phrenologist who measures skulls with the confidence of a man nobody has contradicted in years, and Mrs. Pounds (Ruth Wilson) sees nothing wrong with cutting a scullery maid’s hair and putting it to use as a flyswatter. The couple throws a party where one of their horrid friends brings an actual corpse as a means of entertainment. Their children, Andrew (Jacobi Jupe) and Drusilla (Evie Templeton), are in Winifred’s care, and Drusilla turns out to share more of her governess’s streak than the family would like. Miss Lamb (Thomasin McKenzie) is the pious nursemaid who befriends Winifred and trembles at the thought of a killer in the woods, which is awkward, given who she is sitting next to. We have met this setup before in The Turn of the Screw and its many adaptations, in which a governess is installed in a house full of secrets and left to sort out which of them are hers. The twist here is that the governess is the secret (and a governess is the perfect person to hold one) since she is neither family nor servant and is hired to be seen and never heard. In a house where every polite remark is a risk, the only place Winifred can speak freely is somewhere nobody else can reach.

The women of THE STEPFORD WIVES would have made excellent governesses, provided nobody expected them to have opinions of their own. Pleatherface revisits a suburban nightmare where keeping a perfect house is practically a death sentence, and the men are considerably more frightening than anything hiding in the attic.

That place is the voiceover, and the film uses it with a precision that deserves a closer look. Monroe plays the governess with a soft voice and a face that does everything it can to stay still, and what slips through is small: a head tilt, a twitch, one side of the mouth pulled sideways at the moment propriety demands silence. The narration then says what the face can’t. The camera stays proper and the picture stays solemn, so we see a woman in black crossing a hallway with stiff arms, while the voice reports something monstrous in the tone you’d use to describe the weather. The gap between the two is where the comedy lives, and the timing is Monroe’s. Feito’s novel was told from inside this head too, and critics of the book kept noting that the reader has to decide how far to trust it, so the film’s decision to keep the voice makes sense. It also means we never get a clean look at which self is in charge...because both are talking at once.

This is where the voiceover becomes essential to the film’s argument. Screenwriting advice often treats narration with suspicion, especially when it tells audiences what the images should already communicate. But VICTORIAN PSYCHO puts that conventional wisdom to good use by making the voice and the image disagree. Monroe’s Winifred can pour tea with perfect composure while her narration cheerfully reveals thoughts no respectable governess would dare express. The humor comes from that divide, but so does the film’s understanding of the madwoman in the attic: a figure whose very existence depends on being kept out of sight. Winifred has learned to perform the role expected of her so convincingly that her face can barely betray what’s happening underneath. We can see the respectable governess, but we can hear the woman Victorian fiction would have locked away. The attic has to speak for itself.

The governess tradition has another famous member, and she makes a useful comparison. Mary Poppins is the cheerful version of the same split, a woman whose public self is all charm and discipline and whose private self is never explained. She is also (if you look at her squarely) a little unhinged: vain enough to check her reflection in every window, insistent on describing herself as practically perfect, and quick to deny any of the magical afternoons ever happened. Poppins gets away with it because the strangeness is coded as delight, and nobody asks what she actually is. Winifred has the same self-assessment but none of the discretion, and her lessons arrive with the same confidence. One of her maxims, that when you come across an animal in pain, you should kill it, is a line I almost hear sung, a nursery rhyme in the spirit of a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down. Poppins sweetens the chores, and Winifred sweetens the stabbing, and the difference is that Poppins keeps the mad part offstage while Winifred puts it in the narration.

Going back to the tagline of "Jane Eyre meets American Psycho,"  we can't finish without menionting the second half of that line. Patrick Bateman is the original narrator whose polished surface and violent interior share a voice, and the film borrows that mechanism while swapping the designer suits for starched manners. Where Bateman reports his routines like a glossy catalog, Winifred reports hers like a book of etiquette, and in both cases the real horror is how reasonable the tone sounds. Put Mary Poppins and Patrick Bateman in the same brain and you have a governess with spotless manners, a perfectly organized schedule, and a very particular idea of mercy. The pairing also explains why the film can feel lighter than its body count, since a killer who describes violence this wittily makes us laugh before we flinch. Several critics wished the film would linger more on the gore, and I think the voiceover is partly the reason it doesn’t, because the narration converts each murder into an anecdote before we have time to be horrified. 

It’s tempting to ask who in the house is actually sane, and the film plays with the question from its first line. Winifred says she’s the sanest person she has ever met, which is a performance by the governess and a conviction by the voice behind her. In a household that measures skulls, harvests hair, and throws parties for corpses, the second reading is harder to dismiss than it should be. The film doesn’t excuse her, and nobody watching would call her a hero, but it does suggest that the thing locked in the attic was the one telling the truth. Victorian fiction put their furious women behind doors so that the rest of the house could keep its manners, and VICTORIAN PSYCHO shows what happens when the door is her own skull and the lock is her own good behavior. We’re left in the unusual position of preferring the voice that can’t be seen, which is the most unsettling thing the movie does...and the funniest.

John Malkovich's aging CIA agent in WILD HORSE NINE is considerably less enthusiastic about murder than Winifred Notty, but he's got a past that makes him difficult to forgive. Martin McDonagh's dark comedy made me laugh at a man I probably should have despised, which turned out to be the most unsettling part of the experience