Another film based on a book by Colleen Hoover, Verity is glossy trash. That is only a problem if you really dislike glossy trash though, and the only thing that really matters is whether or not this is good glossy trash.
Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a young writer who is struggling to find any major success. That looks set to change when she is plucked from relative obscurity to be a ghost writer on behalf of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway). Verity is a best-selling writer, known for her ability to write great villainy. She's also paralysed and unable to speak after a recent car crash, but her publishers are trying to keep that on the down low. Not only is Lowen in a very strange situation, she's there with Verity's handsome husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and a journal full of dark secrets that nobody else is aware of.
It's strange to think that director Michael Showalter has such a lot of comedy in his earlier works because what is really lacking here is fun. Nick Antosca's screenplay is disappointingly tame (aside from a core idea that feels like an updated riff on a memorable moment in Leave Her To Heaven), the 117-minute runtime takes too long to take viewers to an end point that is hugely unsatisfying, and none of the central cast members get to let their hair down in ways that the premise should allow.
Hathaway comes closest to actually enjoying herself, but even she ends up far too restrained when you think about what is being presented to viewers. This should have been an easy home run for her. She ends up striking out instead. At least there's the odd attempt to lean into the silliness from Johnson, who I am starting to like more and more for her enjoyably varied movie choices, and for boldly uttering the lines: "That's just my face. I have resting bored face. I get that a lot". She cannot lift up the whole movie alone though, and she's not helped at all by a fairly somnambulistic Hartnett. Brady Wagner gives the kind of child performance that forces me to avoid commenting on it, for fear of accidentally hurting the feelings of someone so young, Irina Dvorovenko is completely wasted, and nobody else makes much of an impression.
There's a small amount of gratuitous nudity, and an oh-so-fleeting moment of unbridled passion, but those are played out in a surprisingly tame and prudish way, as if Showalter and Antosca want to pay lip service to the kind of film this could be without fully committing to it. Although I am unfamiliar with the source material, it becomes clear as the film plays out that there was room here to play around more with the characters and some thriller movie tropes. I was reminded of a film I saw years ago at a festival, Red Velvet, but that film had the freedom and creativity to have fun with different perspectives. This does not.
I really wanted to like this. And the first two thirds of the movie came close to the kind of entertaining silliness I assumed it would be. It all comes crashing down in that third act though, culminating in a finale so preposterous and unsatisfying, yet also smugly raising an eyebrow to viewers as it all ends with some attempt at interesting ambiguity, that it should leave most people feeling as if they have just wasted two hours. Verity isn't worth trying to get invested in, and that's the sad truth.
4/10
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