Anne Hathaway has done just about everything this year: agonized as a pop star (Mother Mary); returned to, and rescued, journalism (The Devil Wears Prada 2); regally fought off suitors (The Odyssey); and battled dinosaurs (The End of Oak Street).
Now, with Verity—an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2018 novel—she’s headlined one of the goofiest films of her career.
An old-school melodrama of hidden secrets, seductive passions, and murder most foul, the Oscar-winner’s latest (Oct. 2, in theaters) is roughly on par with her 2019 fiasco Serenity, meaning it’s a psychological thriller lacking acuity and suspense.
What it does have is plenty of unintentional laughs, all generated by a script that treats subtlety as a four-letter word and performances that embrace campiness with wholehearted gusto. Ridiculous right up to a conclusion that’s simultaneously deflating and incoherent, it’ll make for an amusing night out at the theaters, albeit not in the way the filmmakers envisioned.
“I don’t read books you can buy in an airport,” replies Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) when asked if she’s familiar with the works of best-selling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway). This is funny not simply because she states this while being offered a job to help complete Verity’s latest novel, but because she herself is trapped inside such a trashy story.
A struggling crime-fiction writer, Lowen’s trip to hear this proposal is rudely interrupted by a car accident that splatters her with blood. Fortunately, she’s taken to a coffee shop to clean up by Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), a hunk who appears out of nowhere and, in a bathroom where Lowen is amazingly comfortable stripping out of her crimson-stained clothes, offers her the literal shirt off his back.
The sparks between Lowen and Jeremy are immediate, and their gruesome meet-cute is the first instance of Verity clumsily co-mingling death and sex—a marriage that’s also suggested by an audiobook of one of Verity’s tomes in which the author reads prose (from a killer’s perspective) with ludicrously dark sensuality. As it turns out, Jeremy is Verity’s husband, and he persuades Lowen to take the gig.
Enticed by the requirement that she work at his and Verity’s remote home, she accepts. With her agent Corey (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s Ismael Cruz Córdova) wishing her good luck, she relocates to the middle of Vermont nowhere, where she discovers that the reason Verity needs assistance is that she was in a car accident and is now confined to a wheelchair, incapable of speech or movement.
Director Michael Showalter decorates his tale with raging storms, shadows that streak across characters, and myriad sequences featuring text passages superimposed over people’s faces. Verity is as formally excessive as its dialogue is ripe, and before long, Lowen is growing closer to Jeremy, who’s grieving the loss of his young daughter Harper in a drowning accident in the lake behind their abode.
Harper’s twin brother Crew (Brady Wagner) survived that calamity, but he’s a peripheral factor in these proceedings, which soon have Lowen discover Verity’s secret autobiography (titled “So Be It”) in which she recounts her marriage to Jeremy, promises “ugly and honest and bloody and a little bit terrifying” disclosures, and ominously warns, “There’s no light where we’re going.”
Verity’s success is due to novels told from the villain’s POV, and her confessional manuscript—whose passages are dramatized in hot-blooded fashion by Showalter—implies that she may be a monster. Verity’s flashbacks involve trysts in limousines and sex that’s so scorching it compels the author to bite her headboard. Though Lowen is disgusted by revelations about Verity’s true nature, she nonetheless quickly becomes enamored with the idea of being her.
Aside from striving to complete Verity’s work, Lowen tries on Verity’s clothes and jewelry and masturbates to fantasies about being taken by Jeremy as his wife once was, and between those sequences and two separate overhead shots of a nude Johnson in the shower, Verity works hard to generate steaminess.
Alas, it never materializes, because the film’s story is hopelessly clunky and obvious, its every gesture and word overdone to the point of hilarity. Johnson and Hathaway deliver an avalanche of impassioned looks and exaggerated reactions, both of which escalate once Lowen begins suspecting that Verity is pretending to be comatose. Coupled with the mounting memoir bombshells, Lowen fears she’s in mortal danger, and those concerns are amplified by the fact that she’s actively trying to steal Verity’s life while living under her roof.
Nick Antosca’s screenplay is lurid enough to provide a few minor humorous pleasures, such as a pre-accident scene that finds Verity sneering with jealousy at her own kids, whom she believes have stolen her husband’s affections. Hathaway chews scenery in flashback passages and stares blankly in the present-day material, whereas Johnson alternates between libidinousness and “resting bored face” as a protagonist eager to professionally and personally replace her incapacitated employer.
When it comes to corniness, Hartnett gets the short end of the stick; Jeremy is a bland object of covetous affection. Still, the actor has chemistry with both actresses, and he capably performs his contrived narrative duties as the film barrels toward its silly finale.
Verity breathlessly builds anticipation for its ludicrous twists, and yet they’re not quite as crazy as was seemingly promised by the tale’s set-up. At the very moment Verity appears to be prepping a truly loony climax, it simply ends, and its attempt at haunting ambiguity is a pitiful substitute for genuine fireworks. It’s as if everyone decided that they didn’t have the heart to go all-out, regardless of the fact that by letting their foot off the gas, they were cheating their audience out of the sensationalistic insanity for which such a project exists.
For Hathaway, Verity concludes a 2026 teeming with diverse roles, and she certainly attunes herself to the action’s demented and devious wavelength. Unfortunately, she’s denied the opportunity to push her character’s potential malevolence to its outermost limits.
Verity squanders all its stars in frustratingly thin pulp, but because she’s the one who appears most game for psychotic absurdity, it’s the headliner who ultimately winds up being its biggest victim.
