Verity has “moneymaker” scrawled all over it. It is yet another spawn of the Colleen Hoover literary kingdom, though thematically it’s actually a departure from the romance-led It Ends With Us (2024) and Reminders of Him (2026), instead playing out as a near-identical twin of last year’s thriller The Housemaid, by fellow bestselling behemoth Freida McFadden, which earned a tidy $400m at the global box office.
Replace Sydney Sweeney’s monotone, mysterious cool girl with Dakota Johnson, and swap in Anne Hathaway for Amanda Seyfried as the wealthy, beautiful, slightly older woman who hires her, and you’ve basically got the plot of Verity – infused, of course, with some forced homoerotic chemistry. Josh Hartnett plays the man in the middle, an object of mutual, competitive desire for the two women portrayed in The Housemaid by Brandon Skenlar.
A part of me is thankful that Hollywood seems so invested in reviving the star-led, erotic melodrama – the likes of which Adrian Lyne refined in the Eighties and Nineties with films such as Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal, and which have been glaringly absent from cinemas in recent years. If only Verity were up to the task. If only it were sexy. Or camp. Or fun. Or even just silly. If only it didn’t deliver narrative exposition via the hot sauce-based, online celebrity interview series Hot Ones.
Verity is an homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca by an author who once named her florist protagonist Lily Bloom. Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a down-on-her-luck, small potatoes writer hired to ghostwrite for Hathaway’s Verity Crawford, the best-selling author of a thriller series praised for its “f***ed-up characters”, after she is left mentally and physically incapacitated by a car accident.
Lowen is invited by her husband Jeremy (Hartnett) to the Crawford home, a brutalist dungeon somewhere in remote Vermont, to rifle through Verity’s notes. There, she stumbles across a memory stick containing what appears to be an unpublished memoir in which Verity confesses to a heinous crime, supposedly revealing herself to be a very glamorous psychopath. Lowen is morbidly drawn in, and begins to mimic Verity’s behaviour – a process symbolised by the bite mark on Verity’s headboard, which she left many years ago during particularly passionate sex with Jeremy. Lowen has a chomp on it herself when she inevitably hooks up with Jeremy, too. It’s exactly as kinky as this film gets, not an inch more.
The film, like Verity herself, is always eager to proclaim we’re headed down a one-way road to sicko town. Events do kick off with a pretty effective spot of blood splatter. But, all these Gothic shenanigans – mostly Verity popping up, pale and tired – eventually culminate in the kind of shock, open-ended reveal that makes sense only after you’ve had a bottle of wine or two.
And while Sweeney-Seyfried just about got away with their low-high energy combo in The Housemaid, this Johnson-Hathaway deal is a disservice to both. The former needs a sense of ironic distance to shine (as in the comedy Splitsville, from earlier this year), but here is given nothing but dry exposition interrupted by an occasional outburst of the “you selfish Machiavellian c***” variety. Hathaway makes for a somewhat jarring contrast, a full-force of sincerity, seemingly possessed by the purring memories of her Catwoman.
Hartnett, meanwhile, is well-cast at least as somebody who can simultaneously convey puppy-dog eagerness and mental instability – that said, it’s a quality used to much better effect in his M Night Shyamalan “great dad, shame he’s a serial killer” thriller Trap.
Taking yet another leaf out of The Housemaid playbook, Verity was also directed by a man best known for comedy. But while Bridesmaids’ Paul Feig was primed to bring his knack for depicting complex female friendships to the Seyfried-Sweeney dynamic, Michael Showalter, who excels in rom-coms à la Hathaway’s The Idea Of You, a film he also directed, struggles to find the right tone here, self-aware or not.
Verity is a stodgy reminder you can’t just hit copy and paste on a film and hope for the best.
Dir: Michael Showalter. Starring: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Brady Wagner. 15, 117 mins
