Movie Review: Verity

By John Corrado

Director Michael Showalter’s Verity, the latest adaptation of a novel by It Ends With Us and Regretting You author Colleen Hoover, is a throwback to the psychological thrillers of the 1990s and 2000s, that themselves were inspired by the films of Brian De Palma who borrowed liberally from Alfred Hitchcock.

This leaves Showalter’s film feeling as much like a pastiche as it is an homage, channeled through a veneer of campiness and the tawdry melodrama of Hoover’s writing. The film is built around the delicious pairing of actresses Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway, the former playing a ghostwriter to the latter’s paralyzed bestselling author.

Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, a New York writer who is hired by Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to be the ghostwriter for his wife Verity (Hathaway), who is unable to write following an accident. Lowen’s job is to finish Verity’s incredibly popular crime series and deliver a workable draft to her publisher.

This requires staying at the chilly Vermont mansion that Verity shares with her husband, and their young son Crew (Brady Wagner), so that Lowen can immerse herself in Verity’s world and go through her notes for the series. But she discovers a manuscript for an autobiography that suggests dark family secrets.

The screenplay by Nick Antosca unfolds around Johnson’s Lowen getting sucked further and further into Verity’s world as she reads through this manuscript. The film is dealing in disturbing material, but presented with a soapy, pulpy veneer. It’s a film that wants us to grapple with the darkness of human nature, while being entertained by the trashiness of it all, and the gambit mostly works, at least in the moment.

Yes, Verity can feel trashy, like the airport paperbacks that Lowen decries as a writer early on, but that is precisely the point. The film is littered with knowingly cheesy dialogue, as well as wild twists and turns that might strain credibility when held up to closer scrutiny, but do keep us questioning what is true. And, more importantly, consistently entertained by the ride. The inherent watchability of Verity is also thanks to the performances of the three leads.

Johnson is well suited to a role like this, her face suggesting a quiet empathy and a writer’s imagination. Meanwhile, Hathaway chews into her portrayal of Verity Crawford, including in a series of flashbacks that are crucial to the storytelling. She has to walk a fine line that keeps us questioning if her character is a victim or manipulator, something that Lowen is trying to figure out alongside the audience, and Hathaway is endlessly watchable in the role.

For his part, Hartnett brings a surprising playfulness to his role as the hot husband Jeremy, who maybe seems a bit too chipper at times. It’s a performance that works in tandem with his comeback role in M. Night Shyamalan’s serial killer thriller Trap in terms of reminding us how appealing a screen presence he can be.

It’s hard to necessarily classify a film like Verity as “good,” per se, but why should we assume that’s what it was aiming for? The material works as well as it does because Showalter, whose directorial output has run the gamut from dramedy (The Big Sick, Spoiler Alert), to Oscar-bait (The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and romantic comedy (The Idea of You, also starring Hathaway), knows what sort of sexy-cold pseudo-camp psycho-thriller he is making.

There is an attractive slickness to the production, including the impressively icy house where much of the story is set, that keeps Verity entertaining in its own lurid way. This is a film that, after watching it, reminded me of that famous Pauline Kael quote: “Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.” And I mean that as a compliment.