‘Verity’ turns Colleen Hoover’s messy thriller into deliciously trashy cinema

“There’s no light where we’re going” 

This weekend saw the release of Verity, Amazon MGM Studios’ long-awaited adaptation of what is often considered Colleen Hoover’s best novel.

Directed by Michael Showalter, the thriller stars Dakota Johnson as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer handed the opportunity of a lifetime: finish the blockbuster series of acclaimed crime-thriller novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who has been left nearly catatonic following a car accident.

Lowen travels to the Crawford family’s secluded Vermont home to sift through Verity’s notes and unfinished work. There, she finds herself increasingly drawn to Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), while slowly unraveling the disturbing truth about Verity, her accident and the seemingly alluring man caring for her. Things become considerably darker when Lowen discovers what appears to be Verity’s hidden tell-all memoir, So Be It.

The Blackwell Public Library read Verity for our September Book Club in preparation for the film. While I thought the book was perfectly fine until its asinine ending — and a later-added epilogue that remains one of the worst things I have ever read — I held out hope that a film adaptation could smooth over some of Hoover’s more glaring fumbles.

My hope was, mostly, fulfilled.

Verity plays like an intentional homage to the trashy, sexy thrillers that populated multiplexes in the 1980s and ’90s: Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and their ilk. As it turns out, that may be exactly the lens through which the wildly popular BookTok thriller should be filtered. Last year’s absolutely bonkers The Housemaid understood the same thing.

Strip these stories down to their most basic elements — sex, jealousy, wealth, murder, beautiful people behaving terribly — and suddenly their literary shortcomings matter a lot less. On the page, thin characterization and ludicrous plotting can be fatal. Onscreen, those same shortcomings can be compensated for by stylish direction, beautiful cinematography and actors willing to go completely off the rails.

Verity isn’t a particularly good book.

It makes for a damn fun movie.

Johnson has already cut her teeth on both the best and worst of the material Verity is composed of. She and Jamie Dornan were largely responsible for making the Fifty Shades movies as entertaining as they were, while Johnson’s genuine talent has elevated films ranging from Suspiria and Bad Times at the El Royale to The Peanut Butter Falcon.

Simply by inhabiting Lowen, Johnson gives Hoover’s underdeveloped protagonist more agency, aided by a screenplay from Nick Antosca (Antlers) that is considerably more interested in the possibility that Lowen herself may be every bit as unreliable and devious as the titular Verity.

Lowen is a mess. She hits her vape, pops pills and swigs alcohol, but she’s also funny — sometimes intentionally and sometimes because Johnson plays her as a woman who seems almost bewildered, on a meta level, by the increasingly insane things happening around her.

Then there’s Josh Hartnett, an ever-reliable genre player who has demonstrated considerable dramatic nuance in Showtime’s criminally underseen Penny Dreadful while also proving more than willing to ham it up in something like M. Night Shyamalan’s wonderfully wacky concert-set thriller Trap.

Showalter, whose previous work includes The Eyes of Tammy Faye, knows exactly what he has in Hartnett. He’s just as interested in turning the actor into eye candy as he is in eventually letting him go a little crazy. Hartnett gets to play both the impossibly handsome, wounded husband and something potentially much more dangerous. The uncertainty works.

That brings us to the final piece of machinery that makes Verity run: Verity herself.

Anne Hathaway appears to be acting in an entirely different movie from Johnson and Hartnett.

Thank God for that.

Hathaway gives the film exactly the heightened, soap-operatic performance it needs. Through her eyes, facial expressions and deliciously theatrical line readings, Verity becomes a genuine enigma. We are never quite sure where the real woman ends and everyone else’s warped perception of her begins.

One of the film’s smartest choices is that we rarely get anything resembling an objective look at the "real" Verity. Lowen encounters her through old internet clips and television appearances — including a hysterical Hot Ones segment — and through increasingly feverish fantasies and hallucinations.

That decision adds a psycho-sexual dimension Hoover’s novel never seemed particularly interested in exploring. Lowen becomes as fascinated by Verity as she is repulsed by her, and somewhere along the way that fascination begins teetering between envy, obsession, desire and something resembling love.

She begins styling her hair like Verity. She wears Verity’s clothes. She seduces Verity’s husband. She attempts to "become" Verity so she can finish Verity’s novels, all while devouring the woman’s supposed confession.

Showalter takes that idea to its logical extreme during one of the film’s wildest sequences, when Lowen’s fantasy about Jeremy twists into a nightmare in which the object of her desire becomes Verity herself.

It’s weird. It’s sexy. It’s unsettling.

Most importantly, it understands what kind of movie Verity should be.

That fractured, psychosexual triangle is probably the film’s single greatest improvement over the novel. Hoover’s book continually jumps between Lowen’s day-to-day life at the Crawford estate and lengthy sections of Verity’s manuscript. The movie wisely condenses that material into a handful of sequences that leave considerably more of an impression than the novel’s exhaustive approach.

The best thing about Verity, though, is Showalter’s direction.

This is a delicious-looking movie, and I mean that literally. So many contemporary "adult" dramas and romantic thrillers arrive coated in the same desaturated, gray Netflix sheen that Verity almost feels rebellious simply for looking this lush.

Showalter and cinematographer Jim Frohna make the movie as seductive as its stars. The Crawford home isn't merely a setting; it becomes an extension of the people inhabiting it — beautiful, expensive, inviting and increasingly threatening.

Diehard Hoover fans may be befuddled by some of the changes and tweaks made to the source material, but most work in service of a more streamlined story. The movie understands that we don't need dozens of pages devoted to the lurid details of Verity and Jeremy's sex life to understand the nature of their relationship.

It also sidesteps some of the novel’s more gratuitously graphic material, where Hoover’s attempts to shock occasionally crossed the line into unintentional comedy. At a certain point, Verity’s tell-all begins to resemble one of Cersei Lannister’s deliriously unhinged chapters in George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows. That works wonderfully for Cersei. It worked considerably less well for Hoover’s Verity.

Showalter and company seem to understand something the book never entirely did: the premise is already ridiculous enough. You don’t have to keep convincing us.

You just have to make the ridiculousness entertaining.

I doubt Verity will headline many Top 10 lists when 2026 wraps up, and I'm certainly not going to pretend it is some misunderstood masterpiece. But after last year’s fantastic The Housemaid, I was desperately hoping for another glossy adult thriller willing to embrace sex, melodrama, absurd twists and beautiful movie stars behaving like absolute lunatics.

Verity scratches that itch.

Sometimes you don't need prestige.

Sometimes you just need trashy, sexy fun that looks every bit as good as the people starring in it.