When I read the book “Verity”, it deeply creeped me out. The story is dark and twisty and managed to get under my skin. It might not be a “good” book, but it was definitely effective in my experience. That made me nervous for the film adaptation for multiple reasons. Verity is the fourth Colleen Hoover book to hit the big screen. It Ends With Us was a huge box office hit, but it’s now impossible to think about that movie in any other context than the enormous legal and PR battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. Regretting You was not great and Reminders of Him was also not great. So previous experience didn’t inspire much hope for Verity. However, the biggest difference is the subject matter. Those first three films are sappy, tragic romances. Verity is a thriller. Where the previous films were often mocked for being unintentionally funny in their melodrama (like so bad that people laughed), Verity provided an opportunity to play into that, to be winkingly self-aware and make the campiness part of the tone. Colleen Hoover stories are all ridiculous and the other films took themselves too seriously. I wanted Verity to be fun. But still scary. That was actually another reason I was nervous. I don’t like horror movies, I don’t like being scared, and the trailers for the movie looked genuinely scary. I worried about my nervous system being able to survive the theater experience. Well, it turns out my nerves weren’t entirely unwarranted, just misplaced. I found Verity entertaining but a little bit underwhelming. They didn’t lean hard enough into the camp or the horror to keep the movie energized. It was much slower and more subdued than I expected and not nearly as scary as I feared it would be. I know I said I don’t like to be scared, but for a book that kept me up at night, you’d want the movie to at least give you a slight chill.

Colleen Hoover had written 16 romance novels before deciding to try her hand at a psychological thriller. Verity follows Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a writer who is hired to complete a bestselling book series after an accident leaves its original author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), essentially catatonic. Lowen moves into the Crawford family home to work on the novel and begins a complicated relationship with Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). She also finds a secret file in Verity’s office containing her autobiography that admits to obsessive thoughts about her husband and murderous thoughts about her children and Lowen begins to suspect that Verity might be faking her condition. The film stays pretty faithful to the plot of the book. It took reading the book, seeing the movie, and then reading multiple reviews of the movie for me to get the irony of a ghostwriter being haunted. Also, since I didn’t revisit the book before seeing the movie, I didn’t remember how similar the story is to The Housemaid, which came out a little less than a year ago. A young woman enters a wealthy household full of secrets and becomes involved with the husband… we’ve seen this film before (insert Leo pointing meme for me basically saying the title of my own blog). Another book-to-screen adaptation with big stars, Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried in that case, The Housemaid did it better in my opinion. They just really went for it whereas Verity had a lot of untapped potential. As much as I love Amanda Seyfried, I think Verity had so much more going for it in terms of stars and story, but the execution ultimately fell short.

When the film’s title card first appeared on screen, I thought maybe they had nailed the tone. It looked like it had been taken directly from a 1980s erotic thriller. But the movie itself never quite lives up to that. Variety said, “It’s all more muted and anticlimactic than you’d want or expect” and it “never feels energized even by the most absurd behavior of its characters.” Even the jump scares didn’t make me jump. I barely flinched. The movie is occasionally self-aware, like when Dakota Johnson acknowledges her “resting bored face”, but I needed way more pulp, camp, and melodrama tuned up to 11. The score by composer Volker Bertelmann weirdly reminded me of Oppenheimer at times, which is an incredible score but definitely not the vibe that Verity wants to be invoking (but it is funny because Josh Hartnett was also in that movie). I do have to give production designer Amy Williams her flowers because the house that 90% of the movie takes place in looks unbelievable. It’s a real house in Armonk, NY known as Beckoning Path and it’s both gorgeous and shocking, cozy and sharp in a way that’s absolutely perfect for this movie. 

We all know it’s the year of Anne Hathaway and now I can officially say that I am 5/5 seeing her movies in theaters this year (what do I win, Anne??). And you don’t get to have five major releases in a year without being a reliable performer. If anyone knew exactly what movie they were in, it was Anne Hathaway. She was bringing the camp, so much so that it sometimes felt out of place when the rest of the movie didn’t quite reach her level. She’s always kind of over-the-top so I think she was really well-suited to this role. I just wish she actually had a little more to do. Josh Hartnett is also innocent. His job was just really to be charming and hot in glasses and cardigans and make out with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. And he did that job very well. Dakota Johnson is always an interesting case. I don’t think her acting was bad in the movie but I do think she’s a low-energy performer, that’s her whole vibe. So as beautiful as she looked in the movie and as entertaining as she was (and always is) on the press tour, I think she was unfortunately miscast in the movie. The story needs someone who can ratchet up the anxiety and portray Lowen’s unraveling so the high tension makes everything feel more intense. Dakota is a little bit too chill to give us that.

I didn’t need Verity to be groundbreaking, just maybe a little more core-shaking (look who’s being campy now!). I mean, it’s an incredibly dark story of a woman trying to kill her own children (amongst other dark and taboo things). The movie needed more oomph and more impact to drive that home. Verity isn’t terrible but just somewhat forgettable. It might be the most successful (as a film, not at the box office) of all the Colleen Hoover films to me, but that’s honestly not a high bar. Will we one day look back on this time of adapting her novels as a failed experiment? Time will tell. But maybe Verity is an example of a movie that’s more enjoyable if you haven’t read the book. Less expectation.

2026 Count: 77 movies, 46 seasons of television, 1 special