A new governess arrives at a manor, a group of protesters refuses to leave a federal building, and a Nintendo game sends you back to school. Three releases from November 12 and 13 ask very different questions about who's allowed to set the rules.
Victorian Psycho gives the governess the dangerous part
Bleecker Street released Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho in U.S. theaters on November 13. Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a governess who arrives at remote Ensor House in 1858 with disturbing impulses she tries to keep hidden. Jason Isaacs and Thomasin McKenzie also star. The film premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Bleecker Street’s synopsis and the Associated Press interview lay out the premise and release.
There’s a familiar agreement in a gothic story. You follow the person who's new to the house because they don't know what anyone is hiding. Every room is a little less familiar to them than it is to the people who live there. You borrow their unease while they work out the rules. A governess makes that position even trickier: she’s trusted with the children but doesn't get to decide how the household runs.
Put someone like Winifred in that job and the agreement gets shaky. The household can read good manners as proof of good character, especially from someone employed to teach them. The audience goes in knowing that reading is unsafe. A polite exchange can tell us what Winifred has learned about the house and what the house has failed to learn about her. The setup gives the genre’s familiar first question, “What is this family hiding?”, an uncomfortable companion: what does the family assume it already knows about the person it hired?
Being Heumann puts the fight inside the building
Siân Heder’s Being Heumann began streaming globally on Apple TV on November 13, following a select theatrical release on November 6. Ruth Madeley plays disability rights organizer Judy Heumann, and Mark Ruffalo co-stars. Apple’s trailer announcement sets the story in 1977, when a coalition of activists occupied federal offices to demand action on disability rights.
The detail that gives this premise its shape is right there in Apple’s description: officials wouldn’t take Heumann’s calls. A phone lets a person with an office choose when to listen, or whether to listen at all. The sit-in makes ignoring people an active choice that has to be made in the room with them, and then made again the next day.
That changes what a movie about a public figure can ask us to notice. A speech might give the story a high point. An occupation makes the hours before and after the speech count, too. How do people make it possible for one another to stay? Who does the work that never makes it into the speech? Those are the questions that make this premise sound like a story about a coalition, even with one person’s name in the title.
Pikmin 4 turns a habit into something you can practice
Nintendo released Pikmin 4 – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Dandori Academy on November 12. It adds a series of exams for the game's task-planning system, with medals and 72 stages planned for release over time. Existing owners can buy an upgrade pack for Switch 2. Nintendo’s launch announcement explains what’s new.
Think about the first time you sent one group of Pikmin to carry something and realized you could walk away with the rest. A little scene you had been treating as one task became two. You started seeing a route through the garden where you had only seen a list of things to pick up.
An exam can make that shift easier to see. With a defined challenge and a medal to aim for, you can replay a stage and find out whether your new route was actually better or just felt busier. The expedition gives you reasons to care about getting things done. The academy gives you a place to notice what you do with the time in between.
For more on the choices that make familiar stories feel different, here’s my piece on Ted’s long way around in How I Met Your Mother. I share more of these on Instagram.