Verity Review

With Verity, I had more hope that it would buck the trend. Divorced from the sentimentality of previous adaptations, this story opens with a meet-cute that’ll give you whiplash. After introducing Anne Hathaway’s best-selling author Verity Crawford through interviews with the likes of Gayle King, where she discusses the darkness in her writing, struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) enters the chat. Lowen’s agent has landed her a meeting with Crawford’s publishing house for a mysterious job opportunity, but on the way, she not only witnesses a road accident but is drenched in the blood of the cyclist involved. It’s an opener as out there as the one in Meet Joe Black (IYKYK), but it does provide an opportunity for Josh Hartnett’s handsome stranger to step in and help clean her up.

In typical Hoover fashion, the pair trauma bond: He tells her he dragged his dead daughter out of a lake, and she says her mother died of cancer the week before. There’s no build up, just some awkward exposition-dumping in a men’s toilet. They’re soon reunited at the publishing house, where it’s revealed that he’s Verity’s husband, Jeremy. He and the editors want to commission Lowen to finish his wife’s novel series; Verity is in a comatose state after a car accident and cannot speak or move. So, with little deliberation and due to the shoehorned fact that Lowen is also being evicted from her New York apartment, she packs up and moves into the Crawfords’ sprawling Vermont home for six months.

There she meets Verity, a shell of her glamorous self wearing a glazed stare. This is one of the few scenes the women share; most of Hathaway’s performance is marginalised to interviews on the likes of Hot Ones and the Call Her Daddy podcast, as well as flashbacks layered with sultry voiceovers as Lowen reads Verity’s secret autobiography. Every time she picks it up, sentences run across the screen, and often Lowen is superimposed over scenes from the past to try to enliven the act of reading. It doesn’t.

What’s most infuriating is how long it takes Lowen to finish the text. It’s unbelievable that an author would constantly run away from the autobiography to masturbate and go on a date with Jeremy, given how unflinching Verity’s candour is. She reveals juicy details about her marriage and hints that their daughter’s death might not have been an accident — how did she not finish it in one sitting? Nothing screams “padding for time” more than this tedious set-up, accomplishing little in the way of ingratiating the viewer with Johnson’s “pick me” girl protagonist.

Nor does it scratch the surface of who Jeremy actually is beyond the one-dimensional trope of a swoon-worthy husband. Screenwriter Nick Antosca, who recently impressed with his adaptation of Cape Fear, hints at some resentment on Jeremy’s part for his wife’s success, but the script never probes deeper than in a final act reveal that flings the missing pieces at you in one blink. The best Antosca offers is an examination of the reliability of the narrator, but even that effort is phoned in. Michael Showalter’s direction is similarly dull, conveying little of the vision seen in his Oscar-nominated films, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and The Big Sick. Instead, it plods an uneven, uninspiring route into cliché and lazy convention.

That Anne Hathaway has been on an exquisite run of big screen releases from The Odyssey and Mother Mary to The End of Oak Street and The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes this, her last 2026 performance, even more disappointing. What a lead balloon for everyone involved — one that proves a moratorium on Colleen Hoover adaptations is long overdue. To misquote Lady Catherine from Pride and Prejudice: “Are the shades of cinema to be thus polluted?”