Review: Verity
Four movies in and 24 books deep, you know what you’re getting from a Colleen Hoover production: dark secrets in small towns, brunette women with mysterious pasts all inexplicably involving car crashes, and six-foot-three men with names like Ryle Kincaid or Miller Adams who all look like different flavors of Clavicular. Her books aren’t high art—they’re Wattpad success stories marketed toward people who own wine glasses that say “I can’t adult today” in cursive script.
None of this has to be derogatory if you go in with the right expectations, and Verity fits the formula. The brunette woman du jour is Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a struggling thriller writer assigned to ghostwrite several books for fellow brunette and far more successful author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who (in Lowen’s words) writes novels that are “chapter after chapter of intrigue and fucked-up characters.” Verity is now, however, in a vegetative state after a mysterious car crash that her six-foot-three husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and their young son, Crew, both seem to know more about than they’re letting on. The telenovela-for-the-corn-belt-crowd puzzle pieces begin to fall into place for Lowen after she discovers Verity’s unpublished memoirs in a locked drawer, revealing (you guessed it) several dark secrets.
Director Michael Showalter (as in Wet Hot American Summer [2001] star/cowriter Michael Showalter) classes it up a little bit with overt visual references to film noir classics like Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Notorious (1946), and Rebecca (1940). Unlike Paul Feig’s 2025 adaptation of The Housemaid (based on a Freida McFadden novel, but spiritually in the Hooververse), which played up its melodrama as tongue in cheek, it’s hard to tell how seriously Showalter and his cast are taking the movie, especially when it comes to an inevitable final twist that is played straight despite being scream-out-loud deranged. Is the audience supposed to be laughing when Verity appears on chicken wing–based talk show Hot Ones not once, but twice? What about when a cyclist is hit by a car in front of Lowen, launching seemingly his entire body’s volume of blood at her like she’s at the Kids’ Choice Awards and just got slimed? The film never fully commits to being campy or earnest, occupying a tonal beige zone that starts to wear thin as the two hours of slow-burning reveals drag on. One wishes Showalter and his cast would have leaned harder toward the twisty hysteria of something like A Simple Favor (2018) instead of trying to imagine what a Hitchcock movie would be like with less tension and more Chobani product placement. R, 117 min.
Wide release in theaters
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