Villanelle kills with style and a smile, and a minute later happily digs into a tub of ice cream. She is charming, funny, almost childlike, and she feels not the slightest remorse. She is also something fiction rarely portrays with precision: a woman who fits the clinical profile of psychopathy —a profile science itself built, above all, by looking at men—.
// The theoryA profile, not a sentence
Psychopathy is neither an insult nor a verdict: it is a clinical pattern. Hervey Cleckley described it as a «mask of sanity» —a normal façade over an emotional void— and Robert Hare systematized it in his PCL-R scale: superficial charm, grandiosity, absence of remorse and empathy, flat affect, impulsivity and a constant hunger for stimulation. It is worth remembering: not every psychopath is violent, nor is every criminal a psychopath. It is a profile, not a conviction.
The scale also has two factors: one interpersonal-affective (charm, coldness, manipulation) and one of lifestyle (impulsivity, sensation-seeking, irresponsibility). Villanelle and Amazing Amy split the picture between them: Amy Dunne is almost pure calculating coldness —factor 1—, while Villanelle lives off the second, that thirst for stimulation that hurls her from one impulse to the next. Two women, two halves of the same profile, and neither resembles the textbook serial killer.
Psychopathy has a gender bias too
Here is Villanelle's twist. The PCL-R and almost all research were validated on male samples, often of prisoners. Psychopathy in women is far less studied and tends to be underdiagnosed: women lean toward a more relational and verbal aggression than physical, and are frequently reclassified as «borderline disorder» instead of psychopathy. Villanelle is exactly what the manual, written in the masculine, barely contemplates.
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// The subjectBoredom as a symptom
The trait that defines Villanelle is the hunt for stimulation to escape a permanent undercurrent of feeling nothing: the affective flatness at the heart of psychopathy. And the contrast with Amazing Amy is illuminating: Amy Dunne is cold, calculating, instrumental; Villanelle is impulsive, playful, driven by sensation. Two faces of the same deficit, both women, both invisible to the stereotype of the male monster. Psychopathy has no single face —and it is certainly not always the one we expect—.
That weariness is no writer's whim. Sensation-seeking is an explicit PCL-R criterion: the psychopath needs growing doses of novelty because their reward system responds flatly to almost everything else. Villanelle kills, gets bored, escalates. And the series nails a clinical detail: how often women with this profile are rediagnosed as borderline personality disorder. They share instability and theatricality, but the core is opposite —in the borderline beats a desperate fear of abandonment; in psychopathy, a void that does not even register it—.
Villanelle
// The crackNeither romanticize nor condemn in advance
Two cautions. The first: fiction glamorizes the psychopath —elegant, witty, dressed in luxury— when real psychopathy is above all gray, everyday exploitation, not stylish murders. Romanticizing it distorts what it truly is. The second: «psychopath» is a label of risk, not a destiny or a sentence. The vast majority of those who score high are not serial killers, and the scale predicts imperfectly.
Moreover, the causes remain under debate —there are neurobiological components and environmental ones too—, and no test should be used to condemn anyone in advance. As throughout the archive: describing a profile is not dictating a behavior, and labeling is not condemning. The value of the concept lies in assessing, not in stigmatizing.
The numbers help deflate the myth. Psychopathy is estimated to affect around 1% of the general population and is considerably rarer in women; the vast majority of those who score high never kill anyone. That is why the forensic risk of bias runs in two directions: dangerous women are underdiagnosed because they do not fit the expected image, while others are labeled carelessly for behaviors that are merely disruptive. Neither blindness nor witch hunt: measure better. Acknowledging that the female predator exists does not make her more fearsome; it makes her more visible, which is exactly what an honest assessment needs.
Diagnose better, not fear more
Recognizing female psychopathy is no academic detail: women are assessed with tools calibrated on men, which skews the appraisal of risk, treatment and even sentences. Better science means fewer diagnostic errors and fairer verdicts. And, along the way, it punctures the comfortable myth that the coldest predators are always men.
Villanelle unsettles not because she is a woman who kills, but because she is a mirror science kept tilted aside. A reminder that the monster does not always have the face of the mugshot we expected.
Three key ideas
- Psychopathy is a clinical profile (Cleckley, Hare): emotional coldness, charm, absence of remorse. Not every psychopath is violent, nor the reverse.
- It was studied mostly in men: female psychopathy is underdiagnosed and often reclassified as «borderline disorder». Villanelle is that blind spot.
- Neither romanticize her (the real thing is gray, not chic) nor use it to condemn: it is a label of risk, not a destiny. Better diagnosis = fairer assessments and verdicts.
Sources · further reading
- Cleckley, H. (1941). The Mask of Sanity. Mosby.
- Hare, R. D. (1993). Sin conciencia. Guilford Press.
- Forouzan, E. & Cooke, D. J. (2005). «Figuring Out la Femme Fatale: Conceptual and Assessment Issues Concerning Psychopathy in Females». Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 23(6).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Por qué Villanelle (Oksana) se convierte en villano?
Killing Eve and psychopathy: Villanelle embodies a profile science was slow to recognize —that of the female psychopath— and, along the way, dismantles the cliché of the male monster.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Villanelle?
El caso de Villanelle se analiza desde la Psicopatía. Psychopathy is a stable pattern of emotional coldness, charm and absence of remorse. Villanelle embodies it with a twist criminology has been slow to address: that of the female psychopath, underdiagnosed because the classic profile was built on men.
