THE STORY – Lowen Ashleigh is a writer in need of work when she is contacted by Jeremy Crawford, the husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford. Due to a mysterious accident, Verity is unable to finish her successful book series, and Jeremy asks Lowen to complete the series. While working on it, Lowen discovers another manuscript, raising questions regarding Verity’s psychological well-being and possible links to her publications.
THE CAST – Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Córdova & Brady Wagner
THE TEAM – Michael Showalter (Director) & Nick Antosca (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 117 Minutes
“There is no light where we’re going,” warns Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway). “Only darkness ahead.” The words, from a document titled “So Be It” on a monogrammed USB drive hidden in the author’s writing desk, appear to be as much about her apparent autobiography as about “Verity”, the film about her. Adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover, the moody thriller marks a departure from the author’s typical romances. Not that Hoover’s romances are all sunshine and rainbows, dealing as they do with relationships between people whom social mores dictate should not be together. While it still deals with a taboo-busting affair, the tone and perspective of “Verity” mark a notable shift from Hoover’s usual style, with a self-consciously dark, arch tone that wants to engulf the reader in its twisted worldview. How twisted “Verity” actually is will be a matter of great debate, given how ultimately tame much of it feels. The film adaptation plays out like a good girl doing her best “Gone Girl” impression, reaching for signifiers of “dark”, “twisted”, feminist erotic thrillers without a full understanding of the darkness of that worldview. It’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing, desperate to make you believe in its villainy but fundamentally unable to do so convincingly.
We gain access to Verity’s autobiography through Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a struggling author whose work has received good notices but little commercial success. All that changes when her publisher brings her in for a mysterious meeting about a ghostwriting gig for an injured author, which turns out to be an offer she can’t refuse: to finish the next entries in Verity’s “The Noble Virtues” series. She’s nervous about being able to get into Verity’s headspace to convincingly write in her voice, but is appeased when Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), who just so happened to assist her in the aftermath of an accident on her way to the publisher meeting, informs her that not only is Verity a fan of her work, but that the gig comes with access to all of Verity’s notes during a stay at their remote Vermont compound. Upon her arrival, Lowen is taken aback by Verity’s near-comatose state; she can neither move nor speak, requiring round-the-clock care. As she works through Verity’s notes, Lowen finds the aforementioned autobiography, in which the author admits to dangerous desires and abhorrent actions, and she starts to lose sympathy for the immobile author. As her desire to comfort the sympathetic Jeremy crosses the boundaries of impropriety, Lowen becomes more and more convinced that Verity may not be as helpless as she seems. But is what she’s seeing real, or is her deep dive into Verity’s psyche causing her to break from reality?
Director Michael Showalter knows the work that has influenced “Verity” and dutifully constructs his film in part as a knowing homage to other Hitchcockian woman-in-peril thrillers, with decidedly mixed results. The sleek surfaces of Jim Frohna’s cinematography give the film an appealing look, especially once it reaches the Crawfords’ gorgeous estate. Their home is one of the year’s great production-design achievements, with rounded rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows, and impossibly long hallways. The retro stylization of Verity’s office and the incorporation of natural elements like rocks and tree trunks into the house’s design say a lot about the characters without the need for exposition, and they provide a feast for the eyes. Thanks to Volker Bertelmann’s pastiche-y score, the film is just as much of a treat for the ears, evoking the best of classic Hollywood composers like Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann. It’s often fun enough to trick you into thinking the film itself is just as much fun, especially early on. But Showalter, much like Hoover, offers a mere simulacrum of the darkness supposedly at the story’s heart, emphasizing the surface-level pleasures of film noir shadows, posh decor, and beautiful people acting ugly instead of what’s actually going on inside the characters.
The characters have more than enough going on to make them fascinating, but that doesn’t quite come through in the execution. Part of this is by design: Between the over-the-top, more stylistic dialogue given to Verity and Hathaway’s seductively arch delivery, that character pops off the screen, but Lowen and Jeremy, by contrast, just sit there, with drippy dialogue that is meant to sound more naturalistic but mostly just sounds lazily functional. Johnson and Hartnett, two charismatic actors who have shown facility with stylization in the past, wither and die on screen trying to give these lifeless characters some energy. It’s a thankless job, since Verity looms so large over the film’s story, but considering we’re meant to see them both as potentially unreliable narrators (Hartnett’s Jeremy is obviously hiding something from his first appearance; Lowen has a habit of mixing her dead mother’s Xanax with wine), there’s precious little that actually draws you towards the characters. Stuck with only the most obvious, broadest emotions to play, both actors are sapped of the uniqueness that makes them such watchable performers. Johnson can still knock out a deliciously off-kilter line reading, but Lowen is such a cipher that she can’t make her interesting, delivering a wan, personality-free performance that only comes to life during an extended erotic fantasy that ultimately feels like a pale imitation of the actress’s past work.
Hathaway, too, riffs on her past work, with more significant success. Taking the heightened physicality and stylized voicework of her performance in William Oldroyd’s “Eileen” and dialing them up to eleven, Hathaway is sensational, weaponizing her velvety voice to give the copious voiceover a spicy kick that elevates the whole film. Whenever Hathaway takes center stage, “Verity” is an absolute hoot, reveling in the character’s wickedness while never condescending to her; the revelations contained in Verity’s autobiography are shocking for saying all the things that women are never supposed to say about motherhood, marriage, and sexual attraction, but Hathaway lets just enough humanity shine through so that audiences can sympathize with her, at least up to a point. 2026 has been a watershed year for the actress, with a new film in theaters seemingly every other month, but Verity may be her crowning achievement, a fully fleshed-out characterization that never loses sight of the burning humanity underneath all that purple prose.
Hathaway is having a blast, and it’s likewise a blast to watch her. The film around her, though, isn’t nearly as much fun, mostly because of the source material. Not the story itself, which contains enough twists and turns to keep you guessing right up until its edge-of-your-seat finale, but where it places its emphasis and how it maintains its tone. When the story shifts to Verity’s writing, the heightened tone makes you lean in; the stylized voiceover makes it feel fresh and exciting. When the story shifts to Lowen’s perspective, though, it flattens out and becomes more generic.
Hoover loves her tawdry details and sordid scenarios, but those presented here (namely Lowen’s connection with Verity’s son and her growing sexual attraction to Jeremy) feel like window dressing, meant to provoke a reaction rather than say anything meaningful about the characters or their situation. Since “Verity” is a thriller, providing thrills to the audience is part of its mandate, but compared to the more genuinely provocative content of Verity’s storyline, everything with Lowen and Jeremy feels uninspired, and the attempts to juice up those scenes cinematically don’t work, only calling attention to how much they lack genuine excitement and interest.
While “Verity” is ultimately too dull to truly provoke, Hathaway is sharp enough to cut through the mediocre muck surrounding her, giving her sections of the film a winningly wicked wink. She’s reason enough to see the film, even if the rest of it leaves a lot to be desired.
