The 21st century has yielded no shortage of stylish horror marbled with devious veins of pitch-dark humor — Peter Strickland’s In Fabric, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, pretty much every Jordan Peele feature. Plenty of skilled directors can manipulate tension and fear while still poking us toward nervous laughter. But others end up with films in which the dueling forces cancel each other out, working as neither horror nor comedy. Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho is one such awkward fusion, ultimately just coming off as silly.

Adapted from her novel by Spanish author Virginia Feito, the film mutes any scare factor by winking at the audience with archly exaggerated performances from an ensemble whose most consistent note from the director appears to have been “Go bigger!” At times, the movie veers almost into spoof territory, but it never commits to the bit enough to be anything more than a mismatched genre hybrid, despite its atmospheric visuals and strong design elements. 

A late entry into Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section — and a perplexing choice — the film will open in the U.S. Sept. 25 through Bleecker Street.

Scream queen Maika Monroe switches teams to play the antagonist, Winifried Notty, who arrives at Ensor House, an imposing country manor adorned with Gothic gargoyles, to take up the position of governess to the two precocious children of screwy aristocrats Mr. and Mrs. Pounds (Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson). 

In one of several voiceover passages that accompany chapter breaks, Winifried observes that the Pounds residence is “a much more dignified house” than those in which she’s previously been employed, the first of many hints at the murky past she’s escaping. We learn that the twins in her charge at one job went missing, that the child in her position before that drowned, and the town she hails from gained notoreity when a string of babies were found murdered.

There are the faintest echoes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in the Yorkshire Moors setting. But if you start getting a Turn of the Screw vibe, you are being misled. Winifried — whose preferred diminutive, also the name of the demon inside her, is Fred, not Winnie — isn’t the one being spooked here. Instead, she’s doing the terrorizing, her unhinged creepiness apparent early on when she finds a severed ear in her bedroom and makes a snack of it. 

Monroe slaps on the twitchy facial tics and drifts about the gloomily lit house in a state of demented distraction from the start. She’s dialed up to maximum madness from the minute we meet her. That’s as much the fault of Feito’s adaptation and Wigon’s direction as the actor’s performance, but it leaves this 19th century Patrick Bateman no place to go, robbing the movie of any element of sneaky shock value.

We learn through Winifried’s voiceovers that her mother tried to kill her when she was 8. “Yours is a soul cloaked in darkness,” she told her daughter. But instead of fearing that darkness, Fred embraced it: “In any case, we are together now till the end.” She was raised by a clergyman who was not her father; it’s inferred that he had shady ideas about parental rights.

In a funny touch of feminist commentary, the Pounds parents are intent on their bratty son Andrew (Hamnet survivor Jacobi Jupe) getting the best possible education but less bothered about glum daughter Drissila (Evie Templeton). “We don’t want her wasting her fertility years in some institute.” When she first meets them, Fred wonders to herself about the children: “Are they just quiet or stupid?”

Trouble surfaces when the gardener reveals to Winifried that he knows about her wicked past, demanding £50, “or some other sort of arrangement,” to keep quiet. The sharp end of an axe was probably not what he had in mind.

Jittery housemaid Miss Lamb (Thomasin McKenzie) proves less trouble to manage, as Fred scares the wits out of her with bogus talk of a ghoul wandering the Moors. And the Pounds clan, far from a model of respectability, have their own seedy history, nonchalantly outlined by Mr. P. when Winifried admires the family portraits dating back generations. One ancestor was executed for committing buggery with his horses, Mr. Pounds’ father was a pedophile, and his mother was riddled with syphilis.

Appearing to have found her depraved people, Winifried vows to claim legitimacy by becoming a member of the Pounds family and making Miss Lamb her lady’s maid. But the voices inside her keep whispering, “Let Fred out!” That means no one is safe. Hallucinatory visuals bleed into reality as she imagines butchering the entire family. Or is it her imagination?

While Wigon’s last feature, Sanctuary, was both playful and controlled, this one has all the restraint of Pee-wee’s Playhouse (which I’d much rather be watching). The biggest issue is that never for a minute is it remotely frightening, despite Ariel Marx’s stormy orchestral score pushing all the correct gruesome buttons. Only in a nicely done coda that wraps things up like an Olde English legend does it become devilishly unsettling.

There’s a strong sense that Feito’s novel got more mileage out of such questions as who is truly sane or insane and whether evil exists in all of us. But that thematic potential is diluted in a movie that keeps hurtling forward without gathering steam.

The entire cast is better than the material; the movie seems convinced it’s a lot funnier and smarter and more disturbingly subversive than it really is. Not sure I entirely buy Monroe in villainous mode, but she gets points for throwing herself into it with deranged gusto. Isaacs and Wilson are such pros that they are amusing up to a point, chomping on the scenery with relish. But that pleasure, along with most others in Victorian Pschyo, wears thin.