Verity teases and ultimately unloads a bit too much information and too many allegedly shocking twists for its relatively simple mystery to sustain itself. The gist of the plot of screenwriter Nick Antosca’s adaptation of the 2018 Colleen Hoover novel is that a new and struggling writer, with a nevertheless distinctive voice, is hired to ghost-write the next few installments of a long-running series for a bestselling author who was in a car accident. The tragedy left Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) nearly catatonic, bound to a chair and under the care of a day nurse for every waking hour of her existence.
The younger writer is Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), whose introduction (being spattered with quite a lot of crimson blood after a bike messenger is killed on a crosswalk) might be too unintentionally funny, and for all the wrong reasons, to be anything other than a huge, gaping contrivance on the part of this plot. Maybe it’s some kind of sick satirical joke of some kind, but in any case, it leads directly into the Meet Cute of this scenario: Lowen meets the handsome Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), who lets her borrow his shirt and—oh, yeah—just so happens to be Verity’s husband and the client with whom Lowen is set to meet in half an hour’s time. That’s a particularly tortured way of introducing us to two of the major players involved here.
The film isn’t quite done with us for the purposes of this introduction, though, because it also involves a pair of genuinely jarring pieces of character information for Lowen and Jeremy to tell each other: Lowen’s mother very recently died, and Jeremy, who insists that he’s seen worse than the bike messenger’s death, had to pull his eight-year-old daughter’s body out of the nearby lake. Confessions like these eventually drive the story of this twisted tale, which continues as Lowen signs a contract to finish Verity’s series and travels to the comfortable and isolated Crawford home to begin her work. There, she finds lives in a sort of stasis—Verity’s literal state, Jeremy’s shattered dreams, their son Crew’s (Brady Wagner) inability or unwillingness to say his late sister’s name or speak of his memories of her.
From here, director Michael Showalter’s movie technically becomes one about waiting around for stuff to happen while Lowen tries to make sense of Verity’s style and story. The first of a couple fatal mistakes here is that Showalter has hitched a lot of this proverbial wagon onto the shoulders of Johnson, who has the capability of being good in a role but not so much a physical willingness to tap into it. Lowen is, until the final few scenes, a reactive presence as Verity’s condition becomes clear and the guiding mystery starts to develop.
At first, it’s the suggestion that Verity is more mobile than her situation indicates, with a few feeble jump scares (and one very, very effective one) of her looking in the direction of Lowen or someone else when neck movement is impossible. Then, it’s young Crew, who claims that his mother speaks to him in spite of her apparent inability to do so. For Lowen, though, it’s mostly the latest and cleverly concealed manuscript, which provides the movie a reason to give us a series of extended flashbacks to key recent events in the Crawford household that are here to suggest that something nefarious is going on behind the scenes.
There is something titillating in all this, and of course, it rests in a lot of third-act developments that are technically spoilers because of how shocking they are meant to be. In a more essential way, though, nothing about them is all that shocking, and so it’s down to the build-up, which creates a character out of the house and its unique layout (the bedroom-turned-nursery for Verity, for instance, which always seems too far away from every other point in the structure, as well as an odd Jacuzzi made to look like a hot spring at the foot of a cliff face). Hathaway’s performance, too, toggles between the alluring mystery she was in life, the convincingly statuesque presence she is in her chair and the figment of Lowen’s imagination as she reads the manuscript.
The eventual downfall, though, is quick, thorough and decisive, as the apparent twists of the chaotic final act—all of which depend on contrivances that would require a reinforced cable for our suspension of disbelief—give way to a final scene that, because it’s the end of the movie, only raises more questions than it could possibly answer. Verity has a lot of nerve and leaves us amusingly bewildered by its game, but there are simply a few too many foundational and structural flaws here for it to stand as more than an admirably trashy little number.
Rating: **½ (out of ****)
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