Well, it’s been quite the Hatha-year for Anne Hathaway, hasn’t it? Returning to work for a tyrannical Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada 2, portraying a flamboyant pop star with issues in Mother Mary, waiting for Matt Damon to come home in The Odyssey, or fighting dinosaurs in The End Of Oak Street, it seems like the actress has truly done it all this year. However, it’s something of a shame that she’s ended 2026 on something of a stinker thanks to Verity – an adaption of a twisty thriller based on the novel by Colleen (It Ends With Us) Hoover.
Now, I’m not here to add to the social media hogpile that usually greets mentions of the author’s name, but as someone utterly unfamiliar with her work, I went into Verity with rather high hopes. After all, the cast that features Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett is appropriately starry enough and director Michael (The Big Sick) Showalter seems to be following Paul Feig from light comedy to lascivious thrillers. But it seems in their efforts to go dark, someone forgot to make Verity actually interesting…
As she grieves her mother’s recent death from cancer, struggling author Lowen Ashleigh is experiencing to find a wider audience for her novels when a once in a lifetime change lands in her lap. Approached by a publisher looking for someone to help an author finish a popular novel series, Lowen is knocked for six when she discovers she’s be stepping in for the world-famous Verity Crawford after a car accident has left her catatonic. While the details of this have mostly been kept from the public, Verity’s husband, Jeremy, offers to put Lowen up at the family’s Vermont home so she can study Verity’s copious notes and try and get the series finished while matching her voice.
However, not long after arriving, Lowen starts to experience a few strange things. Firstly, as Veriry writes all of her novels from the perspective of her twisted villains, Lowen’s going to have to get pretty dark to get into the proper mindset; secondly, the fact that the car accident that rendered her inert may have been a suicide attempt after the accidental drowning of her daughter, Harper, makes things a little awkward when the young author starts to have feelings for Jeremy. However, things take something of a sinister turn when Lowen discovers a secret manuscript that seems to be Verity’s self written autobiography which confesses some truly disturbing things. What’s more, Lowen seems to get it in her head that Verity may not be as catatonic as her behavior may suggest as she catches little clues that no one else manages to see.
Is having to be in the headspace of Verity’s novels just making Lowen’s paranoid, or is something legitimately bizarre truly going on? What is the legitimacy of that damning manuscript and even if Verity is acting at being non-responsive, what could be the reason for such a bizarre deception?
There was a recipe here for Verity to be something of a camp classic; after all, the basic plot that sees obscenely attractive people stumble into some sort of laughably far-fetched conspiracy seems tailor made for the sort of juicy, tea-spilling self awareness that Paul Feig has indulged in with the likes of A Simple Favour and The Housemaid. However, as Verity continues to spin its fairly laboured tale, it’s soon dawns on us that Michael Showalter intends to take this ridiculous shit seriously no matter how silly it all eventually gets. However, after the busy year she’s had, you can’t blame Hathaway for taking a role that mostly has her sitting immobile in a chair with a blank look on her face – she’s been working incredibly hard don’t you know – but it’s just a shame that her emotion-free staring into space ends up mirroring our own.
It all starts routinely enough; Dakota Johnson’s struggling – yet immaculately dressed – author finds herself wooed by Josh Hartnett’s surely-too-good-to-be-true husband as a publishing company needs her scribbling skills to get Verity’s hit series to its conclusion while she vegetates at home. However, despite employing all the glossy tropes these sort of movies often employ, the film seems strangely un-self aware that we’re already very familiar with the basic set-up of films like this and are two or three steps ahead of the story. Even when the film throws in some tasty narrative speed bumps, like a damning autobiography, or Johnson’s character veering into Fifty Shades Of Grey territory as she starts to sexually embrace this new life, you find that the film really needs to lean more into the salaciousness of it all. In fact, if any actress could accurately put across how deliciously silly this all is, it’s Johnson and her perma-sarcastic persona – the movie even has her admit at one point that she has “resting sarcasm face” in a rare moment of self reflection. However, all that po-faced-ness employed by the film ultimately leaves a tonal handbrake on which leads the story to drag mercilessly.
The isolated instances where Hathaway’s eponymous novelist is allowed to be compos mentis takes full advantage of that dazzling wide smile and uses it to give us a more sinister angle to her character the more we discover. Meanwhile Hartnett’s husband manages to walk a line between either being the perfect guy, or potentially riffing on his maniac from Trap – but again, the film seems unaware that we’re already familiar with the tropes and what twists they could possibly lead to. But rather than twisting our expectations, it just slowly plays to predictable type rather than having fun with the central concept.
Anyone hoping for a thriller that has us constantly on edge wondering if Verity is actually comatose, or is simply faking it in order to act out some sinister plan, will probably be fairly disappointed at the lack of cat and mouse played by Lowen and her unmoving opponent as it isn’t really as well utilised as it could have been. Yes, there’s the odd moment where we get admittedly decent jump scares when Hathaway has suddenly shifted position to stare right at us, but the film seems unwilling to play that game when it would much rather play up the romance between Johnson and Hartnett. Imagine how creepy the film could have been with a hollow-eyed, chapped-lipped Hathaway suddenly drifting through the corridors at night without warning, or more tense stand offs where Lowen tries to fake her out and drop her alleged act with the use of pins or other pointy things. Even an impressively cruel and ambiguous ending can’t rouse it from being curiously dull.
What could have been a rousing thriller that took full advance of its inate silliness, Verity instead seems to think that it’s adapting some example of literary excellence that must be treated with upmost respect. Despite a stacked cast and a typically slick gloss covering everything, verily Verity simply isn’t as well read as she thinks she is.
It Ends With Sus.
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