\u201cI have resting boredom face,\u201d explains not-quite-successful novelist Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) during the semi-tawdry thriller Verity. Johnson\u2019s quietly disaffected mien has come across as at least somewhat self-aware in other movies, but her characters are rarely allowed to be so upfront about it. Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), a fellow writer whose life and career Lowe comes to covet, doesn\u2019t offer quite so blunt a self-assessment; she\u2019s not the point-of-view character, and spends much of the movie mute. But when Hathaway takes the mic for extended sections of voiceover, she recites her lines with such archly dramatic affectation that she might as well be saying something similarly winking about her occasional weakness for actorly fireworks. The problem with Verity comes not from this self-consciousness, but from director Michael Showalter\u2019s struggles to convincingly enmesh these two star personas\u2014to make them feel like more than instantly recognizable but weightless paper dolls.<\/p>\n
Yes, that Michael Showalter. After directing Hathaway in the more-rom-than-com The Idea Of You<\/a>, the former member of The State (and behind-the-scenes workhorse of late) has followed his fellow comedy specialist Paul Feig into the world of adapting sexy bestselling novels. Verity has the unusual distinction of setting its (attempted) sexy bestseller in the world of sexy bestsellers: We learn upfront that Verity Crawford may be the world\u2019s most popular novelist. (Presumably second only to Colleen Hoover, the source material\u2019s tireless author.) Lowen, meanwhile, languishes on the lower end of midlist, giving barely-attended readings at Brooklyn\u2019s Books Are Magic, despite her weirdly attentive agent Corey (Ismael Cruz C\u00f3rdova), who appears to be her only friend.<\/p>\n Corey brings Lowen into a fateful meeting with Verity Crawford\u2019s publisher. The author has been in a car accident, and her family is keeping the extent of the damage under wraps. As part of this initiative, Verity\u2019s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) is overseeing the hiring of an author to help finish the remaining books in her series. (Though Lowen and Jeremy\u2019s first encounter actually comes earlier, in a blood-spattered meet-weird for the ages.) Lowen is surprised and flattered to hear that she was Verity\u2019s first choice for the job. Though she isn\u2019t sure she can replicate the writer\u2019s famous voice, she feels some kinship with the Crawford family, who are grieving another recent loss just as Lowen grapples with the death of her mother. That and a pile of money convinces her to accept the deal, which involves staying at the Crawford household in Vermont while she sorts through Verity\u2019s meticulously detailed yet disorganized notes.<\/p>\n Upon her arrival at the Crawford home, Lowen realizes that Verity won\u2019t be offering much input; she\u2019s alive and breathing but catatonic. Lowen also finds a separate autobiographical manuscript, which is where Hathaway\u2019s narration comes in, filling in the backstory between Verity and Jeremy. As Lowen gets further into Verity\u2019s head, she could swear she catches Verity\u2026 looking at her? No, it couldn\u2019t be. Could it?<\/p>\n Verity hinges on this gothic paranoia that Jeremy\u2019s not-quite-ex from his not-quite-past may actually be watching as this usurper makes slightly bored-looking goo-goo eyes at her husband. It\u2019s precisely the kind of atmospheric mystery that big studios and streamers alike consistently fail at, and by those current standards\u2014a streaming-adjacent thriller for adults that oldheads will wish had been directed by Brian De Palma\u2014Verity actually looks pretty good. The bizarre angles of Verity and Jeremy\u2019s ridiculously well-appointed home jut out menacingly into the vast whiteness of the snowy wilderness that surrounds it, and Showalter at least seems to understand the difference between contrast-heavy shadows and plain old dimness.<\/p>\n Yet as a stylish clash of the contrasting brunettes to match The Housemaid<\/a>\u2019s battle of the blondes, Verity lopes around unevenly instead of building to a fever pitch. Johnson revives some of her Fifty Shades<\/a> sexual-awakening routine; in other words, she\u2019s the designated naked one while Hathaway serves as a kind of camp mascot, a vaunted guest star in her own movie. This is where the latter\u2019s big-year ubiquity turns into a drawback; the tortured-artist drama of Mother Mary<\/a>, meditation on storytelling of The Odyssey<\/a>, and split-diopter fest of The End Of Oak Street<\/a> all run rings around this movie\u2019s style without even trying to. (Verity does have at least one split diopter shot, as any aspiring gothic-erotic thriller should.)<\/p>\n This might well be a limitation of Hoover\u2019s novel; it wouldn\u2019t be the first time a talented cast was ultimately subsumed by beach-read machinery that never creates a believably heightened alternate world, much less a suggestion of our own. Hathaway, Johnson, and Hartnett fare better than past Hoovered actors; they all seem aware that they can\u2019t fight the story\u2019s non-negotiable notes of strangeness, which tend to be more alien than truly haunting, and must lean into its abrupt curves instead. Game as they are, though, they\u2019re unavoidably starring in the kind of movie that attempts to evoke ambiguity by having a character explain that they\u2019re being ambiguous. Verity staves off resting boredom for most of its runtime; it\u2019s too silly and starry to be a slog. But it also lacks the rigor of a genre workout, settling instead for mere exercise.<\/p>\n Director: Michael Showalter
Writer: Nick Antosca
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett
Release Date: October 2, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI have resting boredom face,\u201d explains not-quite-successful novelist Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) during the semi-tawdry thriller Verity. Johnson\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":915507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-915506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/915507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}