Review – Verity ⭐️⭐️

As the seasons change and autumn comes into full swing, Hollywood greets us with another Colleen Hoover adaptation – our second film this year.

‘People like me belong in isolated cities. In the tiny town where I grew up, everyone knew everything about each other. Here I’m invisible. I like it that way…’

Anne Hathaway reteams with Showalter to play the film’s titular character, Verity Crawford. She’s a wildly successful author whose morbid thrillers are all told from the villain’s perspective, relishing in the grisly details of each deception or dismemberment. In the eyes of the public, she’s confidence distilled to an art – dolled up in blood red lipstick, working away at her next bestseller as she puffs on a cigarette. As you’d expect from any good yarn, though, looks can very well be deceiving…

Materialists and Splitsville star Dakota Johnson is the film’s true protagonist, really – the power behind the throne. She plays Lowen Ashleigh, a younger and greener writer who, though published, is still looking for her first big hit. Enter Josh Hartnett’s Jeremy, a moneyed and suited chap who with an offer for her. He’s come all the way out to New York City at the behest of his wife, Verity herself, to ask that she ghostwrite the final three books in her Noble Virtues series. It’s an endeavour that will require her to live with them in their rural mansion while she sifts through pages and pages of notes, but it’s a chance at something bigger, one Lowen grabs hold of. 

Anyone who caught The Housemaid with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried earlier may be able to spot where Verity’s going long before it reaches its destination. There’s a house, a hunk and a whole lot of hot water for Lowen to land herself in. These are tropes of the genre, but the recent success of Housemaid proved that you could mine a fair deal of intrigue and thrills out of the usual suspects all the same. This, on the other hand, has a much harder time landing its similar beats, with all involved falling victim to the laborious script to some extent.

I write for The Reporter and I’ve written creatively here and there over the years, but I have to say, I often find stories about writing really tough to watch, or at the very least stories that rely so heavily on what they claim to be discussions of the work. Everybody writes differently – some writers are good; some are even better – but I feel like there’s a special level indulgent grandstanding about the struggles of the craft reserved for some of the business’s worst offenders.

Verity and Lowen seem to fall into that same category, with the whole film carrying a sense of teenage pseudo-intellectualism that brought my own high school journals to mind.

From an early scene where Lowen and Jeremy decide to bare their respective traumas within a minute of meeting each other – an interaction that’s part bonding moment; part Wild West quick draw – it’s clear that we are not among actual people. The many stretches where Verity narrates her own notes, waxing philosophical about just about everything without ever really saying anything, also serve to have us wondering whether she ever had something to her writing in the first place, or if her calling Lowen in was her admitting to having bluffed her last. 

Though we don’t get any real look into Lowen’s own writing – the film makes clear efforts to meld the two women into one, with Lowen imitating more of Verity’s just her voice before long – her flippant comment about never reading any book she could pick up at an airport (when she, herself, can only get an audience of three people for her own readings) makes her a hard candidate to root for.

Combine that with the typically dubious trappings of the genre – these erotic thrillers between married men and new lovers always involving their fair share of grey areas – and it becomes really difficult to find anyone or anything to really latch onto by the end. 

Verity’s recollections in her notes occasionally let Hathaway’s god-given earnestness and allure shine through, like when Lowen reads over her account of first meeting Jeremy and falling giddily in love with him. When that moment came along, some forty minutes into the film, I was glad to have something real and raw to latch onto among all the exterior noise, but those little moments of connection are few and far between. Perhaps that’s intentional given the themes at play here, but it still leaves the narrative feeling really cluttered and disconnected.

With a lesser cast, this script would probably be all but unsalvageable, but its two central stars do their best to give the material a lift up. Having just given us a fresh reminder of her talents in The Odyssey this summer, it’s almost criminal that Hathaway’s role is so limiting, relegating her to voiceover work and hallucinatory appearances, but she lends a crucial bite to Verity. Dakota Johnson really made a name for herself way back with the Fifty Shades trilogy, and despite good work in the interim, she seems to have become Hollywood’s first port of call when they need someone to play whispery and sensual. Though she has her naysayers, I do find she pulls off that energy very well and her flirtatious chops are on full display here.

While I frequently found things that made my skin crawl in all the wrong ways through the first and second acts, Verity’s plot does build to a bonkers climax that, while absolutely ludicrous, did feel like the most enjoyable part of the whole bloody affair. Don’t get me wrong, it’s utterly ludicrous, and twistier than a Curly Wurly, but there was a bit of fun to be had in enjoying the wreck from a safe distance, sitting in the audience.

You’ll no doubt have something to chew on as you leave the cinema, even if you aren’t debating the true meaning of the film’s obnoxiously ambiguous ending as the screenwriter might’ve hoped…

BBFC: Rated 15 for very strong language, strong sex, violence, bloody images.

Verity is in cinemas now.