Verity review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 10.10.26
★★★ 3 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Verity serves up a pulpy Colleen Hoover premise—an ailing superstar author, a hired ghostwriter, and a husband caught between them—but never squeezes enough juice from its star trio. Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, and Josh Hartnett have the charisma to ignite a messy love triangle, yet the direction keeps their chemistry oddly inert; even the sex scenes land flat. Still, the page-turner mechanics work: I was never bored and always curious where it was heading. Think Lifetime-grade writing dressed in better visuals and real-deal performances—modest, uneven, but entertaining if the setup or cast already has you hooked.
Full review — contains spoilers
I liked Verity, even though I don’t think it’s a good movie. I was never bored and never lost interest, and I like watching these actors. But with Josh Hartnett, Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in a trashy thriller based on a Colleen Hoover novel, I expected more. If you’re going to be trashy, you’ve got to do a better job than this.
Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling novelist hired to finish a successful book series for Verity Crawford, played by Anne Hathaway, who has been incapacitated after an accident. Lowen moves into the Crawford home to work on the novels with help from Verity’s husband, Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett. While going through Verity’s writing and records, she discovers a manuscript containing some major family secrets. I don’t want to say much more about what she finds because the plot is fairly simple, and it’s hard to explain the secrets without spoiling the movie.
The biggest disappointment for me is how little the director gets out of these three actors. There’s enough chemistry in the cast that the movie should have been able to do something with it, but neither the attraction between Lowen and Jeremy nor the flashbacks to Jeremy and Verity’s marriage become particularly interesting. Even the sex scenes are poorly shot and strangely flat. Somehow, this movie manages to make a love triangle involving three attractive, real movie stars feel awkward and off-putting. If you’re adapting a Colleen Hoover novel and can’t even make the sex interesting, you’re failing at a pretty basic part of the assignment.
Still, I wanted to know what happened, and that kept me interested despite those disappointments. I don’t think it’s a great movie, but I enjoyed it. It has Lifetime-movie-quality writing with better visuals and acting, so if the premise or the actors interest you, give it a chance.