Verity Review: Anne Hathaway Deserves Better

There is a good movie buried somewhere deep inside Verity. The premise is intriguing, the cast is stacked, and the story has all the ingredients for the kind of dark, sexy psychological thriller that keeps audiences questioning everyone until the credits roll.

Unfortunately, Verity never fully becomes that movie.

Based on Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, the film follows struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who is hired to finish a successful book series written by Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway).

Verity has been left seemingly catatonic following a car accident, leading Lowen to temporarily move into the secluded home Verity shares with her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett).

While sorting through Verity’s work, Lowen discovers a secret autobiographical manuscript containing disturbing revelations that force her to question who Verity really is and what happened within the Crawford family.

It’s a setup practically begging for tension.

The secluded home, a woman who may know more than she can communicate, a mysterious manuscript, a grieving husband and an outsider slowly becoming consumed by another woman’s life should create an increasingly suffocating atmosphere.

Instead, Verity spends far too much of its runtime waiting for something to happen.

And waiting.

And waiting.

There are moments when the film briefly finds the thriller it could have been. A suspicious glance from Verity or an unexpected movement can suddenly inject life into the story.

Lowen’s discovery of the manuscript also introduces the film’s most interesting question: how much of what she is reading should she actually believe? The movie uses flashbacks and Verity’s narration to bring those passages to life, blurring the distinction between confession, fiction and manipulation.

But Verity rarely sustains that tension.

Instead, the film repeatedly stops and starts, moving between Lowen reading the manuscript, flashbacks to Verity’s past and the growing relationship between Lowen and Jeremy. At nearly two hours, the pacing becomes one of the movie’s biggest problems.

For a story built around secrets, obsession and uncertainty, there are surprisingly long stretches where there is very little urgency.

The romance doesn’t help.

Johnson and Hartnett are both capable performers, but Lowen and Jeremy never generate enough chemistry to make their attraction as compelling as the screenplay needs it to be. Their relationship should add another dangerous layer to Lowen’s obsession with Verity.

Instead, it frequently pulls attention away from the part of the story that is considerably more interesting.

That part is Anne Hathaway.

Hathaway is easily the best thing about Verity, and it’s not particularly close.

She approaches Verity Crawford with exactly the kind of commitment the movie itself needs more of. In the flashbacks, she can be glamorous, funny, cruel, seductive and unsettling, sometimes shifting between those qualities within the same scene.

In the present-day sequences, she has far less dialogue to work with, forcing Hathaway to communicate almost entirely through her eyes, facial expressions and small physical choices.

She is fascinating to watch because you can never quite settle on what Verity is thinking.

Victim? Manipulator? Monster? Misunderstood woman?

Hathaway leaves enough room for all of those possibilities, which is exactly what the role requires. Even when Verity is simply sitting silently in a room, Hathaway creates more suspense with a glance than some entire sequences manage to produce.

The problem is that even Anne Hathaway’s star power cannot save this project.

Whenever she disappears for an extended stretch, the energy noticeably drops.

The film’s reliance on Lowen reading Verity’s manuscript also means much of Hathaway’s performance is confined to flashbacks, interviews and voiceover rather than giving her more opportunities to directly interact with Johnson.

Considering how compelling Hathaway and Johnson could have been playing opposite one another, that feels like a major missed opportunity.

Verity also seems uncertain about exactly how far it wants to go.

There are flashes of camp, eroticism, horror and psychological thriller, but the movie rarely commits completely to any of them. The stranger moments are often the most entertaining because they finally give the film some personality.

Yet just when things threaten to become truly wild, Verity pulls itself back toward something much more conventional. That restraint leaves a story filled with sex, death, obsession and deception feeling oddly tame.

Visually, at least, there is plenty to appreciate. The Crawford home provides an appropriately luxurious yet isolating backdrop, and the polished production design gives the film the glossy appearance expected from an adult psychological thriller.

It looks like the setting of a deliciously twisted mystery. The movie simply doesn’t generate enough sustained suspense to take full advantage of it.

Then comes the final stretch, where the twists begin arriving much faster.

Without spoiling where everything lands, Verity wants audiences to leave the theater questioning which version of events they believe. That’s an interesting idea, particularly for a story about writers and the power of controlling a narrative.

But the movie spends so much time getting to that ambiguity that the payoff feels rushed rather than revelatory. Even the final revelations cannot completely compensate for how slowly the film reaches them.

That’s ultimately the frustration of Verity. It isn’t completely unsuccessful. There are entertaining moments, an intriguing central mystery and enough twists to inspire some post-movie conversation.

At three stars, there is certainly something here for fans of the novel or anyone looking for a glossy thriller with a little absurdity mixed in.

But with this cast and this premise, “something” isn’t enough.

Anne Hathaway gives Verity the danger, unpredictability and theatricality the rest of the movie desperately needs. Every time she’s onscreen, you can see glimpses of a much more entertaining version of the film.

Unfortunately, even Hathaway can’t keep Verity from becoming a thriller that should have been far more thrilling.

Verity is now playing in theaters.

 

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