“Verity” Review

While there are certainly small moments of intentional humor in “Verity,” the erotic thriller based on the best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, the telenovela nature of everything else, from the horrendous dialogue to the cartoonishly over-the-top romance and characters, makes this story consistently laughable even as it strives for suspense and mystery.

Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is a best-selling author of crime thriller novels, all told from the perspective of the villain. After a car accident leaves her unable to continue her popular series, her publishing house and husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), hire a little known writer named Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) to move into their home, scour Verity’s disorganized mess of notes and outlines, and ghostwrite three more novels in Verity’s name.

Lowen arrives at the Crawfords’ isolated mansion in Vermont and begins to uncover more intrigue than she expected, including details about a mysterious accident that resulted in their daughter’s death a year earlier. As Lowen finds herself more and more charmed by Jeremy and the life of her dreams, she can’t fight a nagging belief that something sinister is going on and Verity may not be as incapacitated as she wants everybody to believe.

I’m not sure there’s a good version of “Verity,” but I feel confident that there’s at least a better one than what director Michael Showalter and writer Nick Antosca deliver here. For all its lurid ambitions, remarkably little actually happens. Suspicious characters are introduced who could add texture and deepen the mystery only to be dragged along and then dropped with no acknowledgement they ever existed. Details are established that could be leveraged for thrills, such as a conveniently placed nanny cam, but instead fizzle away into nothingness.

Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett understand they are not playing real people but over-the-top caricatures; they don’t need to worry themselves with emotional or logical consistency in their characters but instead focus on delivering maximum camp with each line reading and facial reaction. Hartnett’s Jeremy is a too-good-to-be-true leading man, dashing and emotionally intelligent while Hathaway’s Verity, presented in flashbacks, is a cold, egotistical genius.

Dakota Johnson, on the other hand, is just there. Johnson is to “Verity” as Sydney Sweeney was to “The Housemaid”: an out-of-their-depth performer in a BookTok sensation acting across from castmates who better understand the assignment. Her character tries to preempt any criticism with a line of dialogue, claiming she has “resting bored face” which doesn’t do justice to how bored her whole performance seems. As the dialogue veers into peak nonsense, Hartnett and Hathaway lean into the hamminess while Johnson deadpans her most unhinged lines, rendering what could be good fun into a confused mess.

As the story twists and turns to its denouement, it refuses to let the viewer enjoy any level of narrative equilibrium. Some of the twists are stupid fun, while many of them are just plain stupid. “Verity” is trash, desperate in its need to throw out twists and misdirections to compensate for incoherent storytelling and juvenile in its portrayal of sexuality and romance. Trash, though, can be fun, and basking in the story’s absurdity, with its high-pitched emotions and some surprisingly effective jolts, delivers some joy, even with all of the film’s obvious flaws.

Verity
Rated R for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images.
Running Time: 1 hour and 54 minutes

Director Michael Showalter
Writers Nick Antosca
Stars Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Brady Wagner
Rating R
Running Time 114 Minutes
Genres Crime, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller