™Review: Colleen Hoover's 'Verity' Buries Its Real Twists Under Fake Ones
Josh Hartnett shines in Michael Showalter's Colleen Hoover thriller, but red herrings and flashbacks drain the real twists. 37 percent.
"Verity" fakes me out so often that when the twists that count finally arrive, they play like one more trick. Michael Showalter's take on the Colleen Hoover thriller has a strong cast and an opening that moves, and it spends both on decoys.
For the first 10 minutes it's a movie that knows exactly where it's headed. Then the red herrings pile up, the flashbacks keep cutting in, and the present-day story, the part that's supposed to hold the tension, keeps losing its air.
Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired by Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to finish the hit book series his wife, the bestselling novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), can't complete after a mysterious accident. While she works, Lowen turns up a manuscript that makes her wonder what's really going on in Verity's head. Amazon MGM Studios opened it in theaters on Friday, Oct. 2.
That manuscript is where the trouble starts, and it's the book's trouble before it's the film's. Hoover's novel hangs its dread on those pages and on what Verity may have done long before Lowen showed up. The screenplay by Nick Antosca stages them as flashbacks, and every trip back stalls the house in the present, which is where the suspense should be building.
Then the movie stuffs that house with suspicion that goes nowhere. A nanny drifts through the story with no point I could find, and several turns exist only so the movie can say it turned. Each one gets cleared away without costing anything but time, and each one drains a little more punch from the twists still to come.
When those twists arrive, they're staged no better than the decoys, with no sense that the floor just dropped out. The movie can still make me jump: when a kid stabs himself in the mouth, I leapt out of my seat. None of the reveals got near that.
Part of the problem is pitch. Showalter came up in comedy, and he co-wrote the summer-camp comedy "Wet Hot American Summer", so it's telling that "Verity" keeps landing where it's hard to tell a telenovela from a satire of one. Hathaway plays Verity at full telenovela volume and sometimes past it, and a few shots tip straight into cheese, none more than one framed off a reflection in glass.
Hartnett is the one who never tips. He's great as Jeremy, the husband the whole house turns on, and he doesn't push when the movie around him does. I liked Johnson, too, as the outsider the story follows into that house, the one person whose suspicion the movie should have trusted.
I give it 37 percent. The cast is strong and the opening is a blast, but by the time the real reveals came, the nanny and the flashbacks had already spent every bit of suspicion I brought into that house.
Source: en.wikipedia.org, retrieved October 4, 2026. Other sources: en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org.
Comments 0