Title: Verity
Director: Michael Showalter
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Harnett
Where: In theatres.
Rating: ***
Review
Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s psychological thriller places struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh in the unnerving orbit of celebrated author Verity Crawford, rendered helpless after a catastrophic accident. Invited to continue Verity’s successful book series, Lowen moves into the Crawford home, where a manuscript hidden among the writer’s papers blurs the line between confession, invention, and calculated deceit.
The premise has deliciously murky possibilities, and the film knows how to exploit them. Its early stretches are deliberately slow-burning, letting suspicion gather around the marriage, the family, and Lowen’s increasingly compromised judgement. Once the revelations begin arriving, however, plausibility is asked to leave the premises. The twists become progressively more extravagant, occasionally producing the guilty pleasure of a thriller that knows exactly how far it can stretch credibility before something snaps.
That is both Verity’s attraction and its central problem. The film understands that unreliable storytelling can make truth elastic, but it sometimes mistakes outrageousness for psychological complexity. Its exploration of obsession, manipulation and moral corrosion is promising, yet the rush toward the next revelation repeatedly gets the better of deeper character development.
Actors’ Performance
Dakota Johnson gives Lowen an appealingly watchable unease, gradually letting curiosity become fixation and suspicion become something darker. Anne Hathaway, meanwhile, embraces Verity’s more theatrical qualities with mischievous relish, making the character difficult to classify as either victim or villain. Josh Hartnett is convincing as the apparently devoted husband, although the genre has supplied enough suspiciously attractive husbands to make his predicament feel familiar.
Music and Aesthetics
The film gets much of its atmosphere from the Crawford home, whose polished interiors become an elegant container for increasingly ugly revelations. The production design gives the story the required Gothic gloss, while Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score lends the proceedings a suitably unsettling pulse. The visual polish, however, occasionally makes the material feel more respectable than it is.
FPJ Verdict
Overall, this thriller asks you to abandon disbelief at the door and then rewards you for doing so. Its twists are irresistible even when they are improbable, and the performances keep the machinery moving. The result is entertaining, stylish and knowingly excessive, but its most unsettling question may be whether shock has been allowed to masquerade as substance.
