It’s a bad sign when it doesn’t matter whose truth you will accept
Best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) has suffered a car accident. Her condition is so serious that she can’t finish writing her popular series of murder mystery novels. So her publisher hires a ghostwriter, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), to complete the remaining books in the series. Lowen will need to spend some days at Verity’s secluded mansion in rural Vermont to study her copious notes and prepare the plot outlines that will follow. The problem is that one can’t enter Verity’s world without becoming tainted by it. The mind that created those sinister fictions has some real dark corners of its own, and in getting to know it from the inside, Lowen will be dragged into a labyrinth of half-truths and destructive obsession.
The biggest factor that works against the success of the film Verity is that it follows the source material, Colleen Hoover’s 2018 novel, too faithfully. Verity the novel has many chapters that are made of second-hand narration, and Verity the film translates them into extensive voice-over sections where events are told rather than shown. The result is that we spend half the movie hearing Hathaway narrate her character’s manuscript, so the experience is more like sitting for an audiobook than sitting for a movie.
The manuscript in question is a memoir that Verity wrote shortly before her accident. Lowen finds it hidden in a flash drive inside a cigarette pack, and the revelations it contains paint a horrific picture of what kind of person Verity is in private. Lowen came in knowing that Verity’s daughter had accidentally drowned in a lake; Verity’s secret memoir gives an alternate account of events, starting with revulsion at her pregnancy and moving on to contempt for her children. One hallmark of Verity’s novels is that they’re narrated by the villain; this document establishes that Verity was capable of mastering that technique by being herself a villain.
So we follow two parallel timelines: Verity’s backstory and Lowen’s present in Verity’s house. Both have problems, plotwise. As I said above, the parts where we follow Verity’s manuscript consist of voice-over narration, which is the opposite of a cinematic approach. And when we’re in the present, not much actually happens. From the trailers, and from the story itself, it’s a given that Lowen will end up embroiled in an affair with Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). But apart from that, Lowen’s role in the movie consists mostly of sitting and reading. Instead of watching a story unfold, we’re learning a story that already happened.
The actors’ wonderful performances do the heavy lifting that the plot can’t. Johnson draws from her prior experience in the Fifty Shades franchise to easily switch between innocent and predatory, while Hathaway, who has had a spectacular 2026 (see for example here, here and here), exudes a mesmerizing malevolence in the scenes set in the past, as well as an ambiguous quietude in the present. Verity’s accident, we’re told, left her immobilized and unresponsive. But this movie is fundamentally built on unreliable narration, so no fact can be taken for certain.
The trick that Verity attempts, but falls well short of accomplishing, is to juggle multiple unreliable narrators and leave the viewer questioning which version is more trustworthy. What (or who) caused Verity’s car accident? What is the extent of her physical impairment? How did her daughter die? Is Verity really the author of that hidden memoir? Is Lowen’s judgment impaired by her abuse of sleeping pills and alcohol? How much of all this might have been orchestrated by Jeremy?
That last part should not be ignored. The movie (as well as the book) introduces a last-minute reveal that is intended to changes how we perceive the character of Verity, but isn’t much of a surprise given that she’s a mystery writer and her memoir sometimes feels hyperbolic. However, this reveal does have massive consequences for how we perceive Jeremy. In the movie (but not the book), Verity’s hidden memoir is discovered in a pack of cigarettes in her office, but Jeremy is the only character we ever see smoking cigarettes. It should also be pointed out, as another clue unique to the movie, that Dakota Johnson looks very much like a younger version of Anne Hathaway. In a story of duplicities and mirrored perspectives, it can’t be coincidence that, when searching for the author that would replace his wife, Jeremy chose one that resembled her so much.
These details make movie Jeremy look a lot less innocent than book Jeremy, while movie Lowen is less a victim of circumstance than book Lowen. I think these changes make for a stronger adaptation, but they’re not enough to save a disappointingly anticlimactic ending. This part is taken straight from the novel, and lands as almost a surrender on the filmmakers’ part. Lowen stumbles upon the final reveal after she’s already made an irreversible choice, so this new information doesn’t have a chance to create the dilemma it’s meant for. Once people have died, it makes little difference whether they were nice or not. Verity feels too satisfied with its own cleverness, but its narrative structure fit the book format better, and its ending robs the resolution of its impact. There are powerful ideas contained here, which neither the novel nor the movie seemed to know how to use.
Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
