Verity: Shiny Movie Stars Can’t Elevate Dull Material

By Liz Braun

Rating: C

Verity is a mild-mannered erotic thriller built on pretty pictures and dubious events. It is part bodice-ripper, part mystery thriller, and entirely illogical.

The storytelling is a confusing pile of misdirection, frothy nonsense and large, bright red herrings. You get 90 minutes of character development and vague intrigue, only to have all of that tossed aside for a finale involving nonsensical developments, about-faces and the usual diabolus ex machina. It makes no sense, but for people who like this sort of thing, this is just the sort of thing they like.

Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is a bestselling novelist whose fame seems to be built on her keen portrayal of villains.

Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is also a novelist likewise working with intense material, but we meet her at a bookstore reading that has only attracted two or three people. Her career is not great.

On the way to an appointment with a publisher, Lowen meets a tall, dark, and handsome stranger named Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) after they both witness a car accident. Grisly though the accident is, you can see the potential for sparks between Lowen and Jeremy.

Lowen gets to the publisher meeting to discover she’s being hired to ghostwrite for the famous Verity Crawford. Crawford has been incapacitated in a car accident, and there’s a book series that needs to be finished. Lowen is told that Verity admires her work and that she has been hand-picked for the job.

And surprise! Also at the meeting is Jeremy, who proves to be Verity’s husband.

The assignment will involve Lowen living in Verity’s house, working in Verity’s office, and using Verity’s notes to get the book finished. And so, she moves to Verity and Jeremy’s impressive house out in the Vermont countryside, an isolated spot where the creepiness factor is amplified by recent tragedy.

Lowen eventually meets Verity, a vital beauty reduced to drooling in her wheelchair after a catastrophic car accident. The extent of Verity’s injuries has been kept from her adoring public.

Having found herself in Verity’s house, picking up Verity’s writing and interacting with Verity’s husband and child, Lowen soon begins to fancy a life like Verity’s for herself. Or maybe she’ll just take over Verity’s life?

Sadly, you won’t care, even though that flirtation with Jeremy certainly suggests that’s where she’s headed.

But wait. Is Verity as fully incapacitated as she appears to be? And what are we to make of Verity’s secret autobiography, a depraved bit of writing hidden by Verity and discovered by Lowen? Is Verity bad?

Why does Lowen take so much Xanax? Is this a plot device to account for Johnson’s dreary low-affect listlessness and dispirited line delivery or are both female leads supposed to be catatonic? Is Lowen bad?

Is Jeremy bad? Is Verity’s nurse (Irina Dvorovenko) bad?

Are writers Nick Antosca and Colleen Hoover bad? How about director Michael Showalter? Is he bad?

Maybe the best approach here is to assume everyone is suspect.

For a so-called thriller, Verity is unusually low on thrills of either the romantic or the scary type. However, bestselling “new adult” author Hoover (It Ends With Us) knows her audience and what they like, so followers of her work are probably very excited about seeing Verity on the big screen.

This is potboiler territory, not that there's anything wrong with that — as Hoover’s monumental book sales and eleventy trillion social media followers can attest.

But you know the drill, people: if you're going to McDonald's, don’t order the lobster.

Verity. Written by Nick Antosca and Colleen Hoover, from the novel by Colleen Hoover. Directed by Michael Showalter. Starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. In theatres October 2.