Verity

OVERVIEW

Verity is the fourth film adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel and, so far, the weakest. On one hand, it earns a few points for embracing the absurdity of its premise and presenting itself as a trashy thriller, avoiding the attempts at sincerity that made some of the previous adaptations so irritating. That doesn’t change the fact that what we are watching is still a ridiculous, often plain absurd story with cheap mysteries manufactured to hold our attention, masking how shallow, derivative, and problematic the material underneath really is. The film follows Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), an unknown, insecure writer hired to ghostwrite the remaining books in a successful series by Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), a bestselling author left incapacitated after an accident. Lowen moves into Verity’s luxurious home to get easy access to her notes, inhabiting the place with Verity’s hot husband, played by Josh Hartnett (you know where this is going, right?), and Verity’s son. Amidst her search, she accidentally discovers what appears to be an unfinished autobiography containing disturbing details that may explain much more about Verity and how she ended up in her current condition. Twists, romance, sex, and nightmares follow as Lowen becomes increasingly obsessed with the Crawford family, and we are asked, over and over again, to question who Verity really is.

BACKGROUND

Colleen Hoover adaptations have already proven there is a reliable theatrical audience for her particular brand of melodrama. While It Ends With Us remains easily the most successful, both Regretting You and Reminders of Him also performed quite well, with women making up roughly four out of every five viewers. Verity, however, has always been the strange one in Hoover’s bibliography. The idea originated after Hoover watched a horror movie with her mother and found herself disappointed by its supernatural explanation, leading her to take the kind of ‘strange’ twists already common in her writing and mix them with more outright thriller elements, plus considerably more sex. The opportunity to revisit the seemingly dormant Hollywood genre of erotic thrillers from the late 1980s and early 1990s particularly interested director Michael Showalter, who reunited with Anne Hathaway after The Idea of You. The timing also feels particularly favorable after The Housemaid turned another lurid bestselling domestic thriller into a $400 million theatrical hit only a year earlier, proving there is still a sizeable audience for exactly this kind of glossy, sexually charged nonsense.

THE REVIEW

Compared to Verity, The Housemaid was at least entertaining nonsense. It did two things right that Verity doesn’t: the cat-and-mouse dynamic between Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, and a ridiculous but fun twist. Here, the actresses barely share the screen and play far thinner characters, while each revelation and ‘surprise’ only creates bigger holes in the narrative. You may get a little fun out of watching Hathaway overact every scene, chewing scenery like no other, as long as you never stop to think about how predictable and stupid it all is.

Its first sin is the generically named Lowen Ashleigh, who we spend most of the film with. She is extremely unlikable and dishonest, taking no shame in reading private texts and coveting a sick woman’s husband (which is completely okay because she might be evil!). The film, of course, balances that by making her talented and unfairly ignored by the world. She will very righteously decline her agent’s advances, only to do basically the opposite with Jeremy later, while the film still treats her like someone the world somehow owes big time.

Johnson delivers another embarrassing performance to add to her pile. Since breaking out in Fifty Shades of Grey, the actress has proven herself more than capable, taking even daring roles in the Suspiria remake, The Lost Daughter, and, more recently, Materialists and Splitsville. yet every other year she somehow comes back to roles that completely waste her talents. Here, she returns to the same et every other year she somehow comes back to roles that completely waste her talents. Here, she returns to the same charisma vacuum and flat line delivery of her Fifty Shades character, creating a lead who seems bored and uninterested, and ultimately completely uninteresting.

Hathaway fares better, even though her character exists almost entirely through Ashleigh’s point of view. Using this as an excuse to go big, the actress is not ashamed to enunciate every line like a soap opera villain. As much as she tries, however, she can’t beat an awful script that gives her terrible dialogue and keeps Verity stubbornly one-dimensional. The nature of the story, and particularly its biggest twist, means we never get a real glimpse of who she actually is, which turns the entire thing into a cheap but mostly pointless theory-making exercise. Who would’ve thought Hoover fans needed their own version of Star Wars theory culture?

Yet part of this could have been forgiven if the film was, in fact, you know, sexy or thrilling. Both Hathaway and Johnson wear sexy clothes and have sex scenes, but it all feels incredibly artificial. Showalter is about as close to Verhoeven as Hartnett is to Michael Douglas. The score tries to inject some thrills with Herrmann-like dissonance and agitated strings, but the cinematography is bland, the scares are so poorly edited they never hit, and the mystery never becomes unnerving.

Which finally brings us to mysteries that make absolutely no sense. [Skip this paragraph if you want to remain spoiler-free.] In the end, we are left to question whether anything we learned about Verity is true, after Lowen finds a note in which Verity claims that the autobiography was merely an exercise suggested by her agent, written from the perspective of the worst possible version of herself. The exercise itself is ridiculous enough, but the explanation creates even bigger problems with everything that came before it. If Verity is telling the truth, Jeremy had already found and read the manuscript before her accident, so why does he react to Lowen showing it to him as if he is learning the truth for the first time? If he already believed it strongly enough to try to kill his wife once, what exactly changes now? How did Verity maintain the appearance of such severe incapacitation for so long, not only around Jeremy but through hospitals, doctors, and nurses? And if the note itself is another fabrication, why write it at all and keep it hidden where there is no guarantee Jeremy would ever find it? It is not ambiguity. It is just plain stupidity.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Verity is a film that pretends to be a sexy exotic thriller while, at the end, it is yet another adolescent romantic fantasy where an insecure young woman is miraculously swept into the orbit of an impossibly wealthy and desirable man. It hides its true intentions like Twilight and the Fifty Shades of Grey did; instead of vampires and BDSM, the smoke is a poorly constructed, completely inept exotic thriller… one that is neither sexy nor thrilling.

At a glance

1/5

“INEPT”

Where to watch

📅Coming soonOct 2, 2026

Where to watch

📅Coming soon

Trailer

Play trailer

Related films

‹ ›

All the President's Men

★★★★★

Three Days of the Condor

★★★★★

Deep Red

★★★★★

Tuner

★★★★★

📅 Nov 20

Minotaur

★★★★★