Midway through Verity— director Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2018 psychological thriller novel— Lowen (Dakota Johnson) says at her belated birthday dinner, “I have resting bored face.” It’s a response to Jeremy’s (Josh Hartnett) accusation that she looks like she’s either not listening to him, or is uninterested in what he’s telling her. Humorously delivered by Johnson, it plays in part like a self-aware poke at her oft-memed, disaffected persona, but it could also be a bit of unintentional meta-commentary on the film itself, which dons V.C. Andrews drag but presents its tawdry, twist-laden premise so drily, not even its juicy lead actors are left largely adrift.
The “Verity” of the title is Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), a best-selling author whose series of thrillers told from the villain’s perspective have sold millions of copies worldwide. Lowen is a writer too, albeit a far less successful one, and when we first meet her, she’s reading from her new collection of short stories at a local bookstore to an uninterested audience of about three people. While on the way to a meeting with her agent and a publisher, she witnesses a car accident involving a pedestrian, a traumatizing event that leads her to meet Jeremy. It turns out that Jeremy is Verity’s husband, and he’s on his way to the same meeting. A debilitating car accident left Verity virtually comatose and unable to fulfill her contract for the next three books in her series. For an immense sum of money, the publisher wants to hire Lowen to take over for her, a job that will require her to also live at the Crawford’s immense, rustic rural Vermont home to parse through Verity’s years’ worth of notes and archives.
Unfortunately, the rest of Verity never quite matches the intensity of that shocking opener. The Crawford home is haunted not only by Verity’s condition but the drowning death of their daughter Harper the previous year; her twin brother, Crew (Brady Wagner) only became increasingly shy as a result. While there, Lowen happens across a flash drive in Verity’s office that contains a document titled “So Be It,” a dark and brooding memoir that only becomes increasingly venomous the more that Lowen reads. As Verity is largely absent from the present-day scenes, these biographical flashbacks— and archival interviews that play more like advertisements for Hot Ones and Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast— are really where she gets in her performance, and where Lowen begins to unravel the family’s dark past. Hathaway is fun, styled not unlike an Old Hollywood diva and acting like one too, with her affected line readings and heightened emotionality that includes a lot of intense eye acting. But while she and Johnson and even Hartnett, to a degree, are playful, the film around them takes itself too seriously. It’s difficult to buy into the story’s mining of truth versus lies when we don’t get a sense of who the people invoked in said truths and lies really are. I know, I know, the fact that you can never really know a person is part of the point; yet, Verity never really exists beyond a figure on the page in the context of the narrative, while Johnson isn’t given deep enough material to flesh out the merging of her professional and personal life with Verity’s, which is a little bit Persona and a little bit Rebecca, with a dash of Vertigo thrown in for good measure, and her leap from bystander abhorred by Verity’s actions and way of thinking to avenging angel who clearly sees justification in some violence is jarring. The dialogue often gestures to their similarly dark backgrounds which manifest themselves in their writing, but the film doesn’t do a lot with this either, and it doesn’t help that we aren’t given much sense of what kind of writer Lowen is, beyond that she works in the same genre as Verity.
In short, there’s a frustrating amount of telling rather than showing throughout Verity. So many large chunks of exposition— not to mention virtually every twist— are delivered in voiceover via letter-reading, with frequent cuts to stunned reaction shots. It’s rather dull, and only becomes more so as the film plods to its moralizing conclusion. The location is appropriately spooky, effectively situating the narrative in a gothic setting— the inside of the Crawford home seems brimming with endless nooks and crannies and hidden spaces, plus odd touches like Lowen’s rock spa, and the perpetually falling snow outside casts an eerie glare over everything— but the eroticism is toned way down, as are the scares beyond one or two jumps played halfway for laughs. I haven’t read Hoover’s novel, so I can’t say how Nick Antosca’s screenplay does or doesn’t differ. I do believe it would have played better as a sillier, earnest riff on the genre. As it stands, it has perhaps the inverse of resting bored face: striving so hard to appear entertaining and thrilling and juicy, but unable to conjure anything interesting in the attempt.
Verity opens in theaters everywhere on October 2. Runtime: 117 minutes. Rated R.
