Verity review: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson elevate a pulpy, twisted thriller

What if the most dangerous thing inside a house isn’t the person you suspect, but the story they’ve left behind? That is the question Verity begins with, and for a while, Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel makes it a deliciously slippery one.

There is a grand house, a best-selling author who cannot speak, a young writer with more curiosity than caution and a husband who seems too vulnerable to be entirely innocent. Add a manuscript that may or may not be a confession, and you have the ingredients for the kind of thriller that wants you to distrust everyone.

It is a promising setup. The trouble is that Verity sometimes seems more interested in being a glossy erotic thriller than in interrogating the ideas that make its premise genuinely intriguing.

Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer who is hired to finish the bestselling series of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), an author rendered unable to communicate following an accident. Lowen arrives at the Crawford family home and begins sorting through Verity’s work. Instead, she finds a manuscript describing a disturbing version of the family’s past: one that includes secrets surrounding Verity’s children, her marriage to Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and events that are considerably darker than the family would like anyone to know.

The manuscript changes everything because it gives Verity a voice even when she physically cannot speak. And this is where Hathaway has the most fun. Her performance is built almost entirely around ambiguity. Verity doesn’t need long speeches or dramatic confrontations to dominate a room. She can simply look at Lowen and make you wonder whether she knows exactly what the younger woman has discovered. Hathaway understands the delicious theatricality of the character, but she also gives her moments of stillness that complicate the caricature.

Then there is the Verity on the page: crueller, more sexually liberated, more provocative and considerably less restrained. The distinction is clever because it raises a question the film never quite stops asking: are we watching Verity as she really is, or the Verity she has written?

Johnson’s Lowen becomes the audience’s proxy, but she isn’t exactly an innocent one. She is a writer, which means she understands the seduction of a compelling narrative. She doesn’t simply uncover information; she interprets it. She fills gaps. She decides which version of events feels convincing.

And slowly, she becomes part of the story. This is where the film’s central triangle becomes more interesting than its romance. Lowen’s attraction to Jeremy is obvious enough, but her fascination with Verity is more complicated. She is repelled by her, intrigued by her and increasingly obsessed with understanding her. The two women are separated by age, circumstance and morality, but they share an understanding of storytelling as power. That should have been the film’s richest vein.

Instead, Verity repeatedly retreats into the familiar language of the erotic thriller: attractive people in expensive surroundings, forbidden attraction, ominous glances, conveniently timed revelations and a house that appears to have more secrets than bedrooms. To its credit, the film knows how ridiculous some of this is.

There is a knowingly pulpy quality to it, and that works better than the moments when it tries too hard to convince us that every twist is devastating. The film is at its most enjoyable when it embraces its heightened nature rather than pretending it is a completely grounded psychological drama.

The Crawford house helps enormously. It is luxurious without feeling particularly warm, and increasingly becomes a physical extension of Lowen’s uncertainty. Doors close. Rooms feel too quiet. The distance between spaces becomes part of the mystery. Showalter understands that in a story like this, architecture can do some of the psychological work. But the atmosphere can only carry suspense so far.

The screenplay’s bigger problem is that it sometimes mistakes information for tension. Once the central mystery begins to unravel, several revelations feel designed to keep the plot moving rather than deepen our understanding of the people involved. The film wants each new piece of information to force us to reconsider what came before, but not every revelation has the emotional weight required to do that.

Jeremy suffers most from this. Hartnett gives him enough warmth to make Lowen’s attraction plausible, but the character remains strangely underwritten. He is husband, grieving father, object of desire and potential suspect, depending on which part of the story the film needs him to occupy. There is clearly a complicated history between him and Verity, but the film spends more time making us wonder what happened than exploring what that history has actually done to either of them.

That leaves the women carrying most of the psychological burden, which isn’t necessarily a problem. In fact, it is one of the film’s strengths.

Johnson doesn’t turn Lowen into a conventional final girl. She is curious, impulsive and occasionally selfish. Her attraction to Jeremy complicates her judgement, while her fascination with Verity begins to blur the line between investigation and obsession. Johnson plays that uncertainty without overplaying it.

Hathaway, meanwhile, seems to understand that Verity is at least partly a camp exercise. She leans into the melodrama without losing the menace. The result is a performance that is considerably more interesting than the material surrounding it. The film also raises questions about women, authorship and the ownership of a narrative that it never fully explores. Who gets believed? Who gets to define a marriage? How easily can a woman become a villain?

These questions linger because the film is better at posing them than answering them. That is ultimately what makes Verity frustrating rather than outright disappointing. There is a sharper, stranger film hiding inside it: one about storytelling, female desire, grief and the dangerous authority we give to written words.

What we get is a glossy, sensual thriller that occasionally glimpses that film before returning to the safer pleasures of twists, secrets and beautiful people behaving badly. Luckily, Hathaway and Johnson make the detour worthwhile. They understand that the real fun of Verity lies not in figuring out who is telling the truth, but in wondering why we are so eager to believe one version over another. The film just needed to trust that question a little more.

Verity releases in India on October 2, 2026.