While there are certainly small moments of intentional humor in “Verity,” the erotic thriller based on the Colleen Hoover novel, the telenovela nature of everything else, from the horrendous dialogue to the cartoonish romance and characters, makes this story consistently laughable even as it strives for suspense and mystery.
Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is a bestselling author of crime novels, all told from the perspective of the villain. After a car accident leaves her unable to continue her series, her publishing house and husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) hire a little-known writer named Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) to move into their home, scour Verity’s disorganized mess of notes and outlines and ghostwrite three more novels in Verity’s name.
Lowen arrives at the Crawfords’ isolated mansion in Vermont and begins to uncover more intrigue than she expected, including details about a mysterious accident that resulted in their daughter’s death a year earlier. As Lowen finds herself more and more charmed by Jeremy and the life of her dreams, she can’t fight a nagging belief that something sinister is going on and Verity may not be as incapacitated as she wants everybody to believe.
I’m not sure there’s a good version of “Verity,” but I feel confident there’s at least a better one than what director Michael Showalter and writer Nick Antosca deliver here. For all its lurid ambitions, remarkably little actually happens. Suspicious characters are introduced who could add texture and deepen the mystery, only to be dragged along and then dropped with no acknowledgement they ever existed. Details are established that could be leveraged for thrills, such as a conveniently placed nanny cam, but instead fizzle away into nothingness.
Hathaway and Hartnett understand they are not playing real people but over-the-top caricatures; they don’t need to worry themselves with emotional or logical consistency in their characters, but instead focus on delivering maximum camp with each line reading and facial reaction. Hartnett’s Jeremy is a too-good-to-be-true leading man, dashing and emotionally intelligent, while Hathaway’s Verity, presented in flashbacks, is a cold, egotistical genius.
Johnson, on the other hand, is just there. Her character tries to preempt criticism with a line of dialogue, claiming she has “resting bored face” which doesn’t do justice to how bored her whole performance seems. As the dialogue veers into peak nonsense, Hartnett and Hathaway lean into the hamminess while Johnson deadpans her most unhinged lines, rendering what could be good fun into a confused mess.
As the story twists and turns to its denouement, it refuses to let the viewer enjoy any level of narrative equilibrium. Some of the twists are stupid fun; many of them are just plain stupid. “Verity” is trash, desperate in its need to throw out misdirections to compensate for incoherent storytelling and juvenile in its portrayal of sexuality and romance. Trash, though, can be fun, and basking in the story’s absurdity, with its high-pitched emotions and some surprisingly effective jolts, delivers some joy, even with all of the film’s obvious flaws.
A version of this review was posted at Curt On The Movies.
“Verity” Directed by Michael Showalter. Written by Nick Antosca. Starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Córdova and Brady Wagner. Running time: 114 minutes. Genres: Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller. Rated R for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images.
