Movie Review: “Verity”
By Bob Garver
“Verity” wishes it was a twisty thriller. It is indeed twisty, but it doesn’t have the heart to be a thriller. The film’s advertising is clearly positioning it as a successor to last year’s hit front-of-the-bookstore novel adaptation “The Housemaid,” though it is based on a book that predates that film’s source material by four years. In fact, it is based on a novel by the popular Colleen Hoover, and it’s easy to picture the studio jumping at the chance to release a movie with Hoover’s name crossed with a setup similar to “The Housemaid.” The problem is that with Hoover’s name comes her trademark sappy style, which is ill-suited to the thriller genre, at least here.
Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling, unpopular, highbrow author. She meets a man named Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) through a shared traumatic experience and within five minutes he’s locking them both in a men’s room together. He eventually reveals that he’s the husband of revenge-thriller author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who is in desperate need of a ghostwriter. He offers Lowen money that she can’t turn down, and soon she finds herself moving into the Crawfords’ house in rural Vermont, where she learns why Verity can’t do the writing herself: she’s been paralyzed following a recent car crash.
Lowen spends her days going through Verity’s stacks of notes so she can approximate her creative voice for the upcoming novel. In the meantime, she bonds with the warm Jeremy and his son Crew (Brady Wagner), who lost his twin sister, Verity and Jeremy’s daughter, in a drowning that barely predated Verity’s car crash. She barely spends any time with Verity herself, but when she does, she notices that the author is able to shoot an icy glare in her direction. It could just be an involuntary reflex or an indication of something darker.
Lowen stumbles upon the manuscript for Verity’s autobiography, which we see through pre-crash flashbacks that allow Hathaway to act with full use of her body. She and Jeremy were once madly in love, especially when they first met and he somehow won her over with what I would call red-flag creepiness. But the relationship changed when she had children, whom he seemed to love more than her, which caused her to love them less. A few chapters later, and Lowen not only personally wants to make Jeremy feel better, but also to punish Verity, who is clearly unreliable on at least one level.
With a title like “Verity,” there is obviously much question throughout the film about who can and cannot be trusted. Verity herself indulged in dark fantasies in her writing, Lowen implies that she’s hiding secrets, and Jeremy is a man in a movie that combines “The Housemaid” with “It Ends with Us” (for Johnson fans, there a little “Fifty Shades” in there too, with some scenes that include biting, wood, and frosting). Supposedly all the deception is there to keep the viewer guessing, but the only guessing I was doing was at how long it would take before the next predictable twist.
It’s not even the predictability or the laughable attempts at salaciousness that are the biggest problem with “Verity,” it’s the slowness. This meandering movie cannot be exciting to save its life. I was genuinely surprised that I was out of the theater in less than two and a half hours with the way this movie was paced. It acts like it wants to be better than the kind of trashy thriller that Verity writes. I’d settle for it being as good as a typical trashy thriller.
Grade: D
“Verity” is rated R for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images. Its running time is 117 minutes.
Contact Bob Garver at [email protected].
