Verity (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)
VERITY (2026)
Starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Brady Wagner, Irina Dvorovenko, KK Moggie, Michael Abbott Jr., Asel Swango, Daniel Echevarria, Stephen Elrod, Thursday Farrar, Tom Galantich, Lukey Klein, Lou Martini Jr., David Goddard, Emily McEnroe, Nathan Tylutki, Michael Muñiz, Gayle King and Alex Cooper.
Screenplay by Nick Antosca.
Directed by Michael Showalter.
Distributed by Amazon MGM Studios. 117 minutes. Rated R.
I have been a member of an online book group, and there are very few books in the last few years which have been more controversial than Colleen Hoover’s Verity. The novel has many fans in the group, and just as many people who can’t stand it. There appears to be no middle ground – people either love the book passionately or completely hate it.
I have not read it yet myself (in fact I’m one of like five people in the world who has never read a Hoover novel), but I have been tempted to give it a try to find out what the fuss was all about – for better or worse.
I had a similar experience a few years ago with another polarizing title in the group, Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing. I had not read that book before seeing the movie. The movie turned out to be not great, but not bad. However, it was good enough to move me to pick up the book. I ended up reading the book soon afterward and mostly enjoyed it.
Once again, my first real exposure to Verity is by way of the motion picture adaptation. So, at least from the movie, was Verity worth all the vitriol on either side of the fence?
Well, after having seen the film version, I can see why it is pretty divisive, that’s for sure. Verity is massively dark, and from what little knowledge of Hoover’s work I have it seems distinctly scarier and more provocative than her other books. I’ve really only seen one other of Hoover’s film adaptations, Reminders of Him, which was much more of a straight romantic melodrama, but to my understanding, her work tends to be much more in that vein.
This is new territory for the author. Verity is a psychological thriller. A rather ambiguous one at that. It is cold where most of Hoover’s work tends to be hot. And there is no happy ending to comfort the audience.
Now, again, I do not know how faithful to the book the film is, but just in watching this version of the material, I am also divided. I have some conflicting thoughts. I will acknowledge that there were some good parts, some fine acting and some significant scares, but overall I am leaning towards the “don’t like it” side of the debate.
That is mostly because Verity is working so hard to be shocking that eventually, for me at least, it became exhausting. There are way too many red herrings, way too many plot coincidences, too many conveniently found confessions (or are they planted?), too many changes of allegiances. At different points, all three of the main characters appear to be good people, to be devious, to be possibly evil, or to be outright crazy. Eventually, the film’s take on the characters changes so often that it becomes numbing rather than thrilling.
I knew I was in for an assault on the senses pretty early on. Less than ten minutes in, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a published but relatively unknown thriller writer, is walking down the New York city streets towards a mysterious-but-potentially-game-changing meeting at the Hachette Publishing Group. She comes to the corner when she suddenly hears a crash and is splattered with blood.
Apparently, some random bike rider was hit and killed by a passing cab, and Lowen was in the splash zone. She is calmed down and taken to a restroom to clean up by another random man on the street, Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), who turns out to be one of the people who was going to be at the Hachette meeting. And yes, this is one of those huge coincidences I mentioned – the stranger on the street who helped her turns out to be at the very meeting she was heading to when the accident happened.
But let’s step back a second. What about the biker? How does he fit into the story? He really doesn’t – he is never seen alive on camera and never plays a significant role in the plot. He gave his life – and copious amounts of blood – just to be the catalyst for Lowen and Jeremy’s meet cute. This kind of sheer cold-hearted antipathy to human life becomes something of a running theme in Verity.
At the meeting, Lowen is offered something of a dream assignment. Bestselling novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) has been incapacitated in an automobile accident and the publishing house – and Verity’s husband Jeremy – would like Lowen to ghost-write the next few books in the writer’s ongoing book series while (or if) Verity recovers.
Despite having her name on top of the credits, Hathaway’s role is significantly smaller than her two co-stars – particularly Johnson. In fact, despite the fact that she appears in several flashbacks and dream sequences, she spends much of her screen time in an apparent catatonic state. (That was shown in the trailer, so it is not a spoiler.)
Therefore, Lowen moves into Verity and Jeremy’s luxurious Connecticut mansion on a lake to go through Verity’s book notes to put together the next book. The house is huge, modern and sterile, but for a while Lowen enjoys being there – her boss’ husband is dreamy, his son is cute, and she seems to have plenty of free time. (Honestly, Lowen spends a lot more time vaping and flirting with Jeremy than actually, you know, writing.)
However, there is a dark force in the house, and quickly things get a little creepy for Lowen, who is a bit deadened by life in general and from the recent death by cancer of her mother. She learns of the death on the lake of Verity and Jeremy’s young daughter. (The deaths of Lowen’s mother and Jeremy’s daughter only get slightly more attention in the story than that poor biker, although the daughter’s death sets lots of the mayhem in motion.)
But mostly freaking Lowen out is the famous author herself. Although completely immobile in beds or wheelchairs because of the accident (or was it an accident?), Verity’s presence is casting a pall over the home, a palpable sense of mournful sadness, making the home feel like a prison – not just for Jeremy and son Crew (yes, his name is really Crew), but also for Lowen.
And is it her imagination, or has she seen Verity move a few times?
Then she finds a hidden thumb drive with Verity’s in-progress autobiography, which divulges a horrific family secret.
And everything just sort of spins out from there.
The rest of Verity works overtime to make you think that this one is guilty – no wait it’s this one – no wait, it’s her. Eventually, you just give up trying to figure it out, because the rug will just be pulled out. You might as well put character names in a hat to see who will survive, who will be good and who will be bad. It gets to be a bit like an M. Night Shyamalan ending, where trick ending follows trick ending follows yet another.
Finally, it settles on a very dark and ambivalent ending. Then there is a brief post-script which – once again – turns everything you thought you had figured out about this story on its head. I would have been irretrievably confused if not for the fact that I’d pretty much stopped caring at least a half hour earlier.
That is a shame, because the cast goes all in for their characters – even if none of those characters are overly likeable. Johnson plays Lowen with a deliberate emotional detachment that suits the character's numbed state but can make it hard for the audience to connect with her journey. That is not a knock on Johnson – that is the role as written – but it does make Lowen something of a cipher.
Hartnett’s Jeremy comes off mostly as a super-chill, nice guy, until he doesn’t seem so nice anymore. However, the actor handles his conflicting natures with style. As noted earlier, Hathaway’s role is much more limited than her co-stars – and in many scenes she is just staring vacantly – but she is chilling in many of her flashback scenes and even is shown briefly to have more humanity than the film tends to acknowledge. Hathaway’s Verity is so hardwired to be creepy and possibly evil that it is impressive to see the actress playing against type, but honestly Verity’s more human moments give Hathaway more to work with.
Unlike with Crawdads, the film version of Verity does not really tempt me to give the book a try, even if it may very well be better than the film. I suspect that the film of Verity will be just as divisive as the book was. However, I can’t imagine it getting quite as many passionate fans.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2026 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: October 1, 2026.
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