★★ (2 out of 4)
A guilty pleasure should be fun. So why is “Verity” such a slogging downer? At least, Anne Hathaway gives it her all. An Oscar favorite for “The Odyssey” and on a five film roll when you add in “Mother Mary,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “The End of Oak Street” and now this, Hathaway gives this thriller the few jolts it can claim. That’s funny since her character, bestselling author Verity Crawfortd, is in a coma for most of the film. There are flashbacks, so don’t panic.
“Verity” is adapted from the 2018 novel by Colleen Hoover, CoHo to the legions of fans known as CoHorts. Hoover has sold over 20 million books, making her romance novel royalty. She’s best known for the 2024 film version of “It Ends with Us,” the domestic abuse drama that is now infamous for the harassment charges made by its star Blake Lively against her costar and director Justin Baldoni, now settled out of court.
Things have been much quieter so far with “Verity.” Working from an erotica-lite script by Nick Antosca, director Michael Showalter adds some welcome mischief to the menace. No surprise there since Showalter’s roots in comedy with MTV’s “The State” led to the Oscar nominated films “The Big Sick” (2017) and “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” (2021).
Anne Hathaway shines, but what’s the good of a thriller with no kick in it?
The “Verity” plot puts our author on a collision course with Lowen Ashleigh (fancy name), a published but struggling writer, pallidly played by Dakota Johnson, who’s been hired by Verity’s dishy husband, Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) for a special project he’s like to keep hidden from public view.
Turns out the car crash that made Verity catatonic—her eight-year-old daughter Harper had suspiciously died in a drowning accident— also made it impossible for her to complete a lucrative thriller series. So hubby suggests that Lowen move into the Vermont mansion he now shares with surviving twin, Crew (a stalwart Brady Wagner), surrounded by Verity’s books and notes of course, the lady herself, now mute and confined to a wheelchair. And there in private, Lowen can finish the cash-cow series known as “Noble Virtues.”
Everybody wins, right? Not so fast. Verity is supposed to be dead to the world. So what’s that killer look she just flashed Lowen from down in the garden? And is Lowen hot for Jeremy, especially after she finds a thumb drive of Verity’s hidden first draft of a memoir entitled “So Be It” about how she and Jeremy met and began experimenting with Kama Sutra levels of carnal knowledge? And are they both festering with secrets and lies? Lowen eagerly devours Verity’s words for answers she may not want to know. Cue the flashbacks.
It’s great to see Hathaway toy with our expectations, kinky and otherwise. But the hot sex could have been hotter as it was in the novel. Lowen, with her self-described “resting bored face,” never seems that into the action, though she has fleshy fantasies (or are they?) with both Jeremy and Verity. Harnett, so scarily good as a psycho in M. Knight Shyamalan’s “Trip,” seems stuck in neutral this time. And the suspense slowly withers and dies.
Like the book, “Verity” has an open-ended climax that leaves us wondering exactly who did what to whom and why. But only Hathaway catches the wicked spirit of Hoover’s admittedly trashy prose. When she’s off screen, we just stop caring. And what’s the good of a thriller that has no kick in it?