Maika Monroe should be the reason a studio writes a check, not the reason a movie that was already in trouble gets saved. Victorian Psycho proves the point twice over, once in how the reviews describe her and once in how Bleecker Street decided to sell her film anyway.

The raves hand her the whole movie, then admit the rest of the cast got nothing. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics consensus calls it “an enjoyably blood-soaked lark that thrives on Maika Monroe’s ferocious lead performance.” That is a compliment with a floor under it: take her out and what is left is a governess, a manor and a blood budget.

Awards Radar’s Joey Magidson gave the film three stars and wrote that “the flick lives and dies on Monroe, often as others around her die, and she’s more than up to the task.” Two sentences later, the same review admits it wishes “Jason Isaacs, Thomasin McKenzie, and Ruth Wilson had more to do.” Three of the better character actors working, and the wish list for them is simply to have jobs. That is what a one-woman show looks like from inside a three-star review.

The movie wrapped around her is thinner than she is. David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter calls it a “mismatched genre hybrid” that plays as “neither horror nor comedy,” with a cast whose most consistent note from the director seems to have been “Go bigger!” Kate Erbland at IndieWire is gentler and still finds the same gap: Virginia Feito’s own adaptation of her novel drops the book’s Christmas massacre, and the climax lands “oddly watered down.”

Nobody in either camp says Monroe is the weak link. They say the script and the staging cannot keep pace with her.

And yet Bleecker Street sold the film like her name was the least interesting thing about it. Bleecker Street’s own page leads with an eccentric governess, a remote gothic manor and vanishing staff, then drops the cast into a block underneath. The trades leaned on a similar shorthand. The Hollywood Reporter introduced the Cannes teaser as coming “from the producers of Longlegs, the feature that solidified Monroe’s status as a Scream Queen.” Her own fame gets used to vouch for the producer’s resume. It never runs the other way, where her name alone is the pitch.

Here is the trailer Bleecker Street chose to run with, a premise and a title doing the selling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDiFol_2j2I

A fair hearing for the other side exists. The Globe and Mail’s Radheyan Simonpillai called the film “adrift with nothing substantial to cling to,” and The Film Yap’s Christopher Lloyd described “Maika Monroe mugging wildly as a killer governess in corset times.” At 75 percent on the Tomatometer from 65 reviews, that read has company. But look at what both of those complaints are actually describing: a project with no floor under it, built around a performance that keeps having to carry a script that keeps changing shape. That is a material failure wearing an acting failure’s coat.

Longlegs taught the industry the wrong lesson

Longlegs cost $10 million and grossed $125.4 million worldwide, a $22.4 million opening weekend that set a new record for Neon, beating Immaculate’s $5.3 million. The campaign is the part everyone copied. Neon hid Nicolas Cage’s face for months, ran cryptic teasers, set up a phone number for strangers to call, and cut a trailer built around Monroe’s own heartbeat climbing from 76 to 170 beats per minute, with Cage’s look never shown at all.

The lesson the industry filed away was “hide the monster.” The lesson that actually mattered was that a $10 million genre film had a face audiences would follow into a dark room, and the face was hers.

By the numbers

She rescues packages. She does not start them.

Victorian Psycho was first set up at A24 with Margaret Qualley attached. That version collapsed, and the film got rebuilt around Monroe with Zachary Wigon directing before Bleecker Street picked it up with cameras already rolling. Director Zachary Wigon called the shuffle routine: “It changed distributors, it comes with the territory of the volatile nature of independent filmmaking.”

Monroe restarts a stalled package. She has not yet been the reason one gets greenlit in the first place.

They Follow, David Robert Mitchell’s sequel with her returning and Neon distributing, was always going to happen. The real test is whatever original script gets bought because a studio knows she will say yes to it, not because an earlier version of the movie fell apart and she was the fix on offer. Finance her first next time, and see what she does with a script built for her from the start instead of handed to her after everyone else quit.