Director: Michael Showalter
Writer: Nick Antosca, Colleen Hoover
Stars: Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett
Synopsis: Lowen Ashleigh, hired to ghostwrite for Verity Crawford, uncovers what appears to be Verity’s autobiographical notes. She wrestles with the confessions about Verity’s husband and finds separating fiction from reality challenging
Verity is one of those films that is good until it’s definitely not. A thriller for the defense of the Lindsay Clancy crowd, the movie is suspenseful, sexy, and seductive; you cannot argue with how arresting it is as a piece of metafiction. The movie blurs the line between what is real and what is not, becoming a sensual unreliable-narrator cliché that, at times, can be genre popcorn-movie bliss.
Again, until Verity just cannot help itself, failing to keep the story simple. For almost 90 minutes, the filmmakers slowly churn up the suspense, and you cannot take your eyes off the leads. Yet the new Colleen Hoover adaptation loses its way by failing to understand what audiences want and need, causing a domino effect of pandering, eye-roll-inducing misdirection, and reveals.
Verity starts as a delicious thriller, where the audience can look past questionable character decisions, gaping plot holes, and bold choices of brutality that will make your jaw drop, but it ends up leaving a bad taste in your mouth. This is another Hoover adaptation that leaves more questions than answers, but those questions usually come around to, “What was the point?”
The story follows Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a respected writer who refuses to write for the airport-reading crowd, which reflects her current financial situation as she is being evicted from her apartment, where she uses a mattress as a futon. Depressed, she uses drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of losing her mother, who just lost a battle with cancer.
Luckily for Lowen, her literary agent, Cory (Ismael Cruz Córdova), finds her a book deal. Unlucky for the guy who gets hit by a car, splattering blood all over Lowen’s porcelain skin on her way to the meeting, a man named Jeremy sees Lowen (Trap’s Josh Hartnett) in shock. He walks her to the bathroom, gallantly giving her the shirt off his back because hers is drenched in blood.
When Lowen arrives, Jeremy is there, who is the husband of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), a Gillian Flynn-type author who sells more books in an hour than Lowen can sell in her lifetime. However, after an accident that has left Verity catatonic, the uber-popular “The Noble Virtues” series, Lowen is assigned the task of finishing the series and paid enough to clear her debts.
Verity is from Mike Showalter, a versatile director behind the cult classic Wet Hot American Summer and the Oscar-nominated The Big Sick. For the most part, Showalter is a steady hand, guiding Nick Antosca’s adaptation as Lowen discovers a manuscript that she has to decipher as a confession or provocative meta work of (erotic) art. In fact, the first two acts do a fantastic job of holding your attention.
Showalter’s framing and cinematographer Jim Frohna’s lens give the erotic thriller some sensual juice. Evocative and, at times, unsettling, with a few jump scares, the movie succeeds as an elevated B-movie because it is pulpy and genre-heavy, but never cheap. That is, of course, until the third act’s final minutes go from clever to absurd, and its visual style only serves to mask the source material’s lack of thematic depth.
In the end, even the committed and sexually charged performances from Johnson and Hathaway cannot save a film that abandons its own convictions. The result is the Verity experience with such low emotional stakes that it comes across as overwrought and contrived, hoping a certain demographic will put on their empathy blinders as an excuse for entertainment.
You can watch Verity exclusively in theaters starting October 2nd!
