MOVIES: Verity (2026, Michael Showalter)

Colleen Hoover is, at the moment, our hottest author of romantic thrillers; this is the fourth cinematic adaption of one of her novels in the last two years.

It's the story of two authors. Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is the Colleen Hoover of her universe, a massively best-selling novel of dark thrillers, always written from the villain's point of vew. Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) writes in the same genre, and has recently published her first novel, which was greeted with general indifference. It is understandably a surprise, therefore, when Verity's husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), offers Lowen a ghostwriting job. The Crawfords' young daughter died recently in a boating accident, and Jeremy tells Lowen that Verity is still indisposed. The new novel is due soon, though, and publisher due dates wait for no author, so Jeremy wants Lowen to complete the current novel. She'll have full access to all of Verity's notes and outlines, and Jeremy even offers to let her stay with them at their ridiculously remote, even more ridiculously large and palatial Vermont home.

Lowen takes the job -- the promised pay is too large to turn down -- and arrives to find that Verity is not merely "indisposed;" she's catatonic and getting full-time nursing care. And among the notes and writing waiting for her in Verity's office, Lowen finds several pages from the draft of an autobiography in which Verity puts a very different spin on her marriage and the death of their daughter.

And so we dive into a "who can you trust?" erotic thriller that never quite lives up to its potential, mostly because Dakota Johnson doesn't seem capable of giving it the campy, manic energy that something this goofy really needs.

When a friend asked me to describe the movie, I told him it was an old-fashioned "had I but known" story. He wasn't familiar with the phrase, and I said, "You know, 'had I but known the evil waiting behind the doors of the mansion...'," and he instantly started laughing. And that is precisely the correct reaction to a story this overwrought; it should be played -- well, perhaps not entirely for laughs, but at least with an understanding that this setup and the endless series of Shocking! Twist! Revelations! that follows cannot be played with a completely straight face. It really is silly on some level, and the movie desperately needs to be aware of that and to steer into it. (That understanding is one of the things that makes, for instance, Fatal Attraction work so well.)

Johnson either can't or won't do that. She's playing this as if it's the drabbest of kitchen-sink drama. Hartnett could, I think, find the right tone, if he had a different scene partner. But Johnson's bland performance traps him in the same style, and because he is (to his credit) trying to at least be consistent, he's nearly as dull even in his scenes with Hathaway, who comes closest to getting the right tone. Replace Johnson with, for instance, Olivia Wilde or Amanda Seyfried, and this movie could have soared. As it is, when we get to the final twist and the "was anyone ever telling the truth?" ending, it's hard to even care anymore.