‘Verity’ Review – A Twisty Thriller With Less Bite Than The Book

Anne Hathaway stars as Verity Crawford in director Michael Showalter’s VERITY, from Amazon MGM Studios. Photo credit: Alisha Wetherill © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

I have to admit, I’m not Colleen Hoover’s typical audience. I’m more of a sci-fi/dystopian/fantasy reader. However, I will say there’s something undeniably addictive about a good thriller, and when Verity was recommended to me, I decided to give it a go. Hoover certainly knows the recipe for a page-turner with mass appeal, and that’s what makes her novels such tempting candidates for the big screen.

Since I read Verity before I saw it, this review is no doubt a little biased. This wasn’t just a casual beach-read either. For me, it was one of those just-one-more-chapter reads late into the night, lamp on, with a firm refusal to glance up at my dark living room. All of this is to say that I walked into this movie with expectations. Would it give me that same can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash feeling? The short answer is it sometimes did, but “sometimes” doesn’t quite cut it for a story whose whole engine is never letting you off the hook.

The story follows little-known writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who is grappling with the loss of her mother and an eviction notice staring her down. She gets hired to ghostwrite for Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), the bestselling author of a twisted romance series who can no longer finish it after a car crash that left her in a catatonic state. Her publishers want someone to wrap things up, and Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), thinks Lowen is the one for the job.

So Lowen heads to the Crawfords’ picturesque lake house to dig through Verity’s boxes of notes for inspiration. Upstairs, Verity sits silent and still under the watch of a nurse. During her sleuthing, Lowen finds a thumb drive containing Verity’s unpublished autobiography. It begins as a first-person account of Verity’s romance with Jeremy and her rise as a writer before curdling into something much darker as she describes motherhood, her twins, and the tragedies that followed. The deeper Lowen reads, the more repulsed she becomes by the woman on the page and the more drawn she becomes to the life surrounding her. It’s all intoxicating to her: the money, the gorgeous home, and the suspiciously perfect husband who delivers an otherworldly performance in the bedroom.

The movie unfolds as a slow-creep guessing game, leaving us to figure out who’s telling the truth and who has more nefarious intentions. Director Michael Showalter and writer Nick Antosca keep the basic skeleton of Colleen Hoover’s novel intact. Amy Williams’ production design is lush and expensive-looking, while the score has that old-school Bernard Herrmann shiver to it, all nervous strings and creeping dread. But if we strip away the handsome production, there’s not much separating Verity from the glossy thrillers that pop up on streaming every other weekend.

The problem is that the movie is too polished and careful, never fully committing to the unflinching, gut-level dread of the book. The Housemaid proved there’s a big appetite for pulpy, twisty domestic thrillers, and Verity should satisfy that crowd. But where that movie knew how to have fun with its own trashiness, Verity keeps one hand on the brakes. The final 40 minutes are where it really comes alive, and Johnson and Hathaway give it more bite than the script sometimes earns.

Dakota Johnson is the reason this movie works as well as it does. She plays Lowen like someone permanently halfway out of the room, and that slightly checked-out energy turns out to be perfect for a woman who spends much of the story observing other people’s lives while quietly wanting her way into them. Anne Hathaway essentially plays two characters. In the present, Verity is almost completely still, and Hathaway makes that stillness unnerving. A blank stare from her can read as helpless or as proof that she’s watching your every move. The flashbacks let Hathaway cut loose, and she plays Verity as someone who seems to be performing her own life for an audience. Josh Hartnett, meanwhile, gives Jeremy the eerie Trap treatment. He’s wrecked yet warm, and just a little too good to be true. Which, in this story, is the most suspicious thing a person can be.

The movie really takes its time getting to the boil. There’s a lot of Lowen wandering quiet hallways and looking moody by the lake. It looks pretty and expensive, but what felt like urgency on the page turns strangely languid onscreen. Worse, this is a twist-heavy story that hits too many of its reveals like a cheesy afternoon soap opera. The dramatic beats and heightened delivery become their own kind of signposting, dulling the sting before the twists even land.

The movie also streamlines the Crawford family’s history. In the novel, the family has already lost not one but both of their twin daughters before Lowen arrives. I understand the impulse to simplify, but it changes the atmosphere more than you would expect. Part of what made the book so suffocating was the sheer amount of grief stacked in every room. Here, the house looks haunted long before it actually feels haunted.

My theater laughed at several moments that were clearly meant to be tense, and I couldn’t figure out whether it was discomfort or the absurdity finally winning out. With a movie this committed to playing everything straight, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. And for a story so horny in writing, the movie felt oddly chilly. The attraction between Lowen and Jeremy is supposed to feel dangerous and a little irresistible, the kind of attraction that makes you complicit even when you know better. Instead, the big intimate moments land somewhere between awkward and unintentionally funny. Biting the headboard in the book? Weirdly sexy. Biting it in the movie? So cringy.

Verity isn’t a bad movie. It’s well cast, it looks expensive, and there are a couple of genuinely fun jolts that had my whole row grabbing the armrests. If you’ve read the book, you’re probably going to walk away loving it more, but there’s enough unhinged drama and twists here to make Verity a pretty fun night out at the movies.

Verity is now playing in theaters courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.

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