Verity review: Anne Hathaway can't elevate this shallow adaptation of Colleen Hoover's thriller

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Verity

Directed by Michael Showalter

Written by Nick Antosca and Colleen Hoover, from the book by Hoover

Starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett

Rating 14A

Runtime 117 minutes

Release date Oct. 2

Anne Hathaway understood the assignment. She often seems to be the only one involved with Verity attuned to the trashiness of Colleen Hoover’s novel, and elevating it.

Hathaway turns up the psychosexual tension even while her character, Verity Crawford, a popular author of airport fiction, is mostly relegated to the background, appearing to be comatose after a near fatal car-accident.

She vamps it up through Verity’s sensuous come-hither narrations, whether describing blood-curdling violence or backseat kinks, playing the femme fatale in flashbacks and projections, wielding all the precision-guided theatricality at her disposal. But she’s often left adrift in a movie that can’t muster up the same thrills or erotic energy that can be found in Hathaway’s performance.

Throughout Verity, I kept wondering what Brian De Palma (Body Double) or Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct) would have done. Director Michael Showalter, who is more at home with rom-coms like The Big Sick and The Idea of You (also starring Hathaway), gestures to those stalwarts of erotic thrillers in interviews, but not so much in the dull, impotent aesthetic he brings to this movie, where sex scenes barely raise a pulse and jump scares produce chuckles rather than frights.

Showalter isn’t exactly working with stellar material here. Verity is Hoover’s 2018 novel. It’s a foray into thriller territory published a couple years after It Ends with Us, the best-selling author’s megahit, which was turned into disastrous tabloid fodder starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

In It Ends with Us, Hoover toyed with an unreliable narrator to give her transition between romance and domestic-abuse drama a sensational hook. With Verity, Hoover takes that gimmick even further, within a narrative set in the literary world, and a genre where such twists and shifting perspectives should feel more organic.

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The movie stars Dakota Johnson in a role that recycles so many elements from her previous foray into trashy erotic fiction, Fifty Shades of Grey. Once again Johnson’s playing a writer, with the same casual, unbothered air she seems to bring to every performance, which makes it hard to parse whether the actor is giving discreet and perceptive or just lazy.

Here that emotional vacancy turns out to be more of a feature than a bug. It feeds into a running gag where others don’t know what to make of her character, Lowen Ashleigh, a blank slate whose expressions (or lack thereof) make for a striking contrast opposite Hathaway.

Lowen’s a struggling author who we meet reading chapters from her book to an audience of three, only one of whom actually seems invested. We find out later that one of the few people who appreciates Lowen’s novel may be Hathaway’s Verity Crawford, the bestselling author who has amassed a Hoover-like following for her dark thrillers, and makes appearances with Gayle King, Call Her Daddy and Hot Ones.

(Considering how this movie panders to the online crowd with these celebrity guest appearances, I’m not sure why they didn’t just throw in an 11th-hour reference to the “Verity’s from Minecraft” meme.)

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It’s Verity’s husband, Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett, who lures Lowen into the author’s Vermont lake house, which is haunted by its fair share of tragedy. Hartnett is especially good at being a figure whose warmth and tenderness is so calculated and intense it easily pivots into scary.

His Jeremy taps Lowen to mull through Verity’s work and ghostwrite the remaining novels in a popular book series that she’s no longer able to complete, while they try to keep the circumstances around the author’s car accident, and present condition, shrouded in mystery.

Verity is in the house. Her eyes are open but she’s unresponsive, giving only a blank stare as she’s fed, bathed and wheeled around. Except that every so often Lowen thinks she catches Verity staring back at her, or stalking about like a spectre, all while she’s trying to inhabit her incapacitated host’s headspace, and perhaps even her life.

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As Lowen goes through the author’s work, including the manuscript for a disturbing autobiography found on a hidden USB, we see those heightened visions of Verity, as victim and monster, with Hathaway wearing a layer of literary artifice in her performance that never takes away from how captivating she can be.

The movie jolts to attention whenever she’s onscreen. The rest of the time, we’re left trying to figure out whether we’re enduring a shallow take on Rebecca or Gone Girl.

Remember the duelling unreliable narrators in Gone Girl? That’s an especially huge influence on Verity, both the book and the movie, which tries to make its derivative paper-thin retread come across as some profound examination of authorship.

Really, it’s just incoherent, the ultimate revelations exposing how little sense these characters and their actions make, which we wouldn’t be dwelling on so much if Verity at least knew how to be sexy or intriguing, or have more fun, along the way.