Verity Review

Verity is the fourth adaptation of Colleen Hoover novel in the space of two years. This film shows Hoover’s work in the psychological-thriller genre.

Lowan Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is a struggling author living in New York. She gets an offer to help complete Verity Crawford’s (Anne Hathaway) popular series of dark thrillers. She is asked to move into the Crawford home in Vermont. Lowan soon discovers Verity’s secret autobiography and becomes suspicious of the catatonic author as she grows closer to Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett).

Verity bears a few similarities to The Housemaid. Both were female-driven psychological thrillers based on popular novels in which a desperate woman takes a job in someone else’s home, discovers things are not what they seem, and gets too close to a married man. Both films were also directed by men known for making comedies. Verity did suffer from being released after The Housemaid. Both tested plausibility, but The Housemaid had a bit more life to it because of its dark wit and Amanda Seyfried’s over-the-top performance.

One of Verity’s first scenes was Lowan getting splattered with a man after witnessing a fatal traffic incident. It was a visceral way to open a film, but raised red flags. Her first reaction was to get clean and go to her meeting. Obviously, shock was a factor; I should know I was once hit by a bus, which resulted in concerned bystanders and a couple of police officers visiting the scene. Lowan treated the incident as a minor inconvenience. Yet, when she read Verity’s memoir, she was repulsed by the words. She had an unbelievable sense of morality. Troubling morality has been a theme in adaptations of Hoover’s work, whether it’s a simplistic look at domestic violence or many characters doing horrific actions which were treated as small mistakes.

Lowan says she has a permanent ‘resting bitch face’ when she was speaking with Jeremy. This ended up highlighting one of the biggest issues with the acting. Johnson has occasionally delivered strong performances (Bad Times at the El Royale was a great example). Still, she has generally been a limited performer, and she is ready to slate a film if it bombs, e.g. Madame Web.

Anne Hathaway’s talents were never in doubt, but she had to half the film in a catatonic state. She was in a wheelchair with a blank stare. It wasn’t the best use of her abilities. When Hathaway played Verity before her car accident, she was seductive yet sinister. Verity was always clad in red, which has multiple meanings: lust, passion, love, and danger, and she was all of those things. Verity’s backstory was a combination of Amy Elliott Dunne in Gone Girl and Eva Khatchadourian from We Need to Talk About Kevin because she was beautiful, yet manipulative and had terrible maternal instincts.

The framing device of the film was Verity’s memoirs. This made Verity a reflective film as all the major events had happened. This led to another issue for the film Verity because it was going backwards instead of forwards. Films like Gone Girl and The Housemaid had more danger, bigger goals, and higher stakes. Verity lacked this. Nor was Verity a detective story where Lowen was trying to piece together a mystery and needed to catch a bad guy.

Verity was a forgettable attempt at a psychological thriller. The story had little drive, too serious considering some of the silliness on display, and wasn’t as sexy or trashy as it thought it was.