Anne Hathaway Deserves a Better End to Her Big Year Than Verity

I left Verity with so many questions and no idea who I’d even direct them to if given the opportunity. Should it be best-selling author Colleen Hoover, who wrote the 2018 novel on which the movie is based — a lurid thriller about, as it happens, a best-selling author as well as the ghostwriter hired to take over her work when that author is incapacitated after a car accident? Should it be screenwriter Nick Antosca, who managed to turn what was already a convoluted gothic romance into something even less plausible and more confusing onscreen? Or should it be director Michael Showalter, who is somehow in a pitched battle with Paul Feig to become our foremost helmer of chick-lit adaptations and who sustains a tone of overheated but knowing fun for a while before letting everything collapse into a giant pile of what-the-hell? Whoever is to blame for Verity, the result is the kind of movie that sends you shuffling out in a stunned silence that lingers until, halfway home, you get it together enough to turn to your companion and ask, “So … why …?”

Verity is named for Verity Crawford — played by Anne Hathaway, closing out her epic year with a whimper after playing a pop star and Andy Sachs again and fending off hoards of unwanted suitors and unexpected dinosaurs. Here, she is a celebrity novelist whose work, we’re told again and again, is fucked-up shit, real dark stuff that is nevertheless popular enough to get her on Hot Ones and Call Her Daddy and buy her the modernist equivalent of a spooky mansion on a lake in which every room appears to have a fireplace and a conversation pit. But the movie’s main character is a far-less successful writer named Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who works in the same genre (of “dark”?) but who has been struggling to get by until she and her agent are called into a meeting at Hachette about a lucrative secret project. Verity is indisposed, and her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), is looking for someone to take over her series and come stay at their Vermont house and go through his wife’s copious notes and outlines. Before they’re introduced at the meeting, Lowen and Jeremy have what amounts to a gruesome meet-cute on the street, when a bike messenger gets mowed down by a car in front of them and Jeremy lends Lowen his shirt because she’s covered in blood. After that, how could they not fall in love?

Verity could be looked at as a lesser sibling to The Housemaid  and A Simple Favor with its mix of hideous lifestyle porn, forbidden lust, and outlandish twists. But it makes more sense to regard it as a kind of Temu Rebecca by way of Jane Eyre. Lowen is a literary equivalent of a governess, hired to take charge of a body of writing rather than the Crawfords’ only remaining child, Crew (Brady Wagner), whose twin sister drowned in an accident that kicked off the family’s tragedies. Verity is the mysterious, possibly wicked first wife, a larger-than-life figure who casts a shadow over the household even as her contemporary reality is that of a catatonic invalid who can’t speak or move, and who’s cared for by an ominous nurse named Anna (Irina Dvorovenko, basically a red herring). And Jeremy is the handsome cipher, the seemingly long-suffering dreamboat of a husband who may or may not be harboring more ominous intentions. Before long, Lowen is trying on Verity’s things while reading through a hidden manuscript billed as an autobiographical confession of all of the author’s nastiest inner thoughts. She starts to believe that Verity fooled the world into believing she had it all when she was actually a nightmare — and then she starts to suspect the other woman isn’t actually injured at all.

The trouble with Verity isn’t that it’s ridiculous, it’s that no one involved is in agreement on what kind of ridiculous it is. Johnson is doing the sly, half-checked-out thing she does when she wants to signal she’s above the material — which is funny in something like Madame Web but here just feels like she’s making a joke at the expense of the audience. Hathaway, meanwhile, throws herself into her part wholeheartedly (of course) but is working with a character who, even allowing for intentional ambiguity, cannot possibly be made sense of. Hartnett brings none of the wickedness that made his performance in Trap so much fun, just coming across as flat onscreen even as his character has to navigate some wild turns. And Showalter can’t make the ludicrousness of the final act work, as though he himself had trouble following all the twists the story throws out. I can’t blame him, when the script seems to go out of its way to make its plot developments incomprehensible. There’s a sequence involving the use of a baby monitor that renders the entire act of DIY surveillance pointless, and a backstory about the recent death of Lowen’s cancer-stricken mother that’s meant to emphasize her mental state but instead feels oddly extraneous because Lowen doesn’t seem to have any emotions about her late parent. Verity has one foot planted in a grounded reality and the other in an absurd one, and the result is that it’s left doing a very painful version of the splits.

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