In one sentence: A struggling writer enters the home of a bestselling author to finish her work, only to uncover a shocking manuscript that changes everything.
Colleen Hoover adaptations are arriving thick and fast thanks to the author’s enormous popularity, but Verity marks something a little different. As the first adaptation of one of her thrillers, its trailer promised something sexy, twisted and suspenseful, perhaps occupying similar territory to The Housemaid. The thriller genre also has the potential to introduce Hoover’s work to a broader audience beyond those drawn to her romantic dramas. With Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett and Dakota Johnson headlining, Verity certainly promised plenty. Unfortunately, the finished film doesn’t quite live up to its promise.
The movie follows published but relatively unknown author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who is hired to ghostwrite for hugely successful novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway). Following an accident, Verity can no longer walk or communicate, leaving her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) searching for someone capable of completing her next three books. Lowen is invited to the family’s remote Vermont home to work through Verity’s notes and outlines in an attempt to understand her voice. While there, she discovers a shocking piece of writing that changes the way she sees Verity and threatens to alter all of their lives.
Truth and perception sit at the heart of Verity, making the title itself particularly significant. Verity means truth, yet almost everything within the film encourages us to question exactly what that means. Hoover has previously used names as meaningful devices within her stories, and here the connection could hardly be more explicit. Each character gives some reason to doubt them. The story is largely filtered through Lowen’s perspective and raises an interesting question; can we ever view another person’s story objectively when everything we know has been filtered through somebody else’s version of events? There are always multiple sides to a story and Verity is at its most interesting when it allows uncertainty to sit between them.
Unfortunately, the characters themselves don’t always receive enough development to make that uncertainty as compelling as it could be. The acting is fine overall, but I wanted more from Dakota Johnson. Considering Lowen is our way into this story, both her character and performance feel strangely underdeveloped. We learn surprisingly little about her, which makes some of her decisions and motivations harder to understand. Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett fare better, and it is easy to understand why Hathaway might have been attracted to Verity. She is the more intriguing character, with considerably more mystery surrounding her. Hartnett also handles Jeremy well, although his relationships with both women require a level of intensity that the film doesn’t always achieve.
There are plenty of steamy scenes, but steam isn’t necessarily the same as heat. The attraction between Lowen and Jeremy is supposed to become increasingly difficult to ignore, yet I never completely bought into their chemistry. It doesn’t exactly feel forced, but neither does it feel natural. Without stronger character development underneath it, some of the sexier material feels included because the film knows it is supposed to be provocative rather than because the characters have generated the intensity themselves.
The pacing presents a bigger problem. The score successfully produced a few jumps, and as someone who is very easy to make jump in their cinema seat, I can confirm those moments worked on me. However, for a thriller, Verity moves surprisingly slowly. There are stretches where it desperately needs to shift up a gear, particularly when its central premise promises so much tension.
There are plenty of twists and turns, but many feel concentrated towards the end. This creates an odd imbalance where the audience spends much of the film waiting for something to happen before suddenly being asked to process revelation after revelation. A more even distribution of these developments might have created the escalating tension the story needed.
Visually, however, the film is much more successful. The remote Vermont house is naturally gorgeous, but its isolation creates an effective sense of unease despite its size. Snow and cool tones dominate the exterior world while warm fires glow inside, creating an interesting contradiction between apparent comfort and underlying threat. There are hints of films such as Misery in the use of an isolated home, a writer and the uncomfortable feeling that something isn’t quite right. The sense of weirdness is reinforced by Lowen’s agent, Corey (Ismael Cruz Córdova), who wants her to accept the job while simultaneously appearing inexplicably uncomfortable with the idea of her actually staying at the house. From early on, the film wants us to distrust the environment as much as the people within it.
Blood also becomes a recurring visual motif, used both to shock and, strangely, to bring characters together through various plot devices. Its first appearance is genuinely unexpected, but the imagery continues through bitten lips, bloodstained smiles and one particularly unpleasant encounter involving a peanut butter-covered knife. The biting doesn’t stop there, with a wooden headboard also finding itself on the receiving end during sex.
The problem is that the film contains many of the individual ingredients required for an effective erotic thriller without ever combining them particularly well. There is sex, violence, mystery, an isolated location, unreliable perspectives and an attractive cast with plenty of secrets. Yet tension needs more than ingredients. It requires pacing, chemistry and characters compelling enough to make the audience desperate to uncover the truth.
Ultimately, Verity is a perfectly watchable but underwhelming thriller. Its exploration of truth and perception provides an interesting foundation and its chilly Vermont aesthetic creates the right atmosphere, but sluggish pacing and underdeveloped characters prevent its twists and relationships from having the impact they should. A little more character development, a quicker pace and perhaps slightly less enthusiastic lip biting might have produced something far more gripping. For a film called Verity, the disappointing truth is that it never quite lives up to its potential.
★★★ (3/5)
