C+

Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson have a mismatched genre face-off in Verity

This might be the best Colleen Hoover adaptation yet. That's not saying much.

By Jesse Hassenger  |  September 30, 2026 | 9:00am
Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
Film Reviews Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson have a mismatched genre face-off in Verity

“I have resting boredom face,” explains not-quite-successful novelist Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) during the semi-tawdry thriller Verity. Johnson’s quietly disaffected mien has come across as at least somewhat self-aware in other movies, but her characters are rarely allowed to be so upfront about it. Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), a fellow writer whose life and career Lowe comes to covet, doesn’t offer quite so blunt a self-assessment; she’s not the point-of-view character, and spends much of the movie mute. But when Hathaway takes the mic for extended sections of voiceover, she recites her lines with such archly dramatic affectation that she might as well be saying something similarly winking about her occasional weakness for actorly fireworks. The problem with Verity comes not from this self-consciousness, but from director Michael Showalter’s struggles to convincingly enmesh these two star personas—to make them feel like more than instantly recognizable but weightless paper dolls.

Yes, that Michael Showalter. After directing Hathaway in the more-rom-than-com The Idea Of You, the former member of The State (and behind-the-scenes workhorse of late) has followed his fellow comedy specialist Paul Feig into the world of adapting sexy bestselling novels. Verity has the unusual distinction of setting its (attempted) sexy bestseller in the world of sexy bestsellers: We learn upfront that Verity Crawford may be the world’s most popular novelist. (Presumably second only to Colleen Hoover, the source material’s tireless author.) Lowen, meanwhile, languishes on the lower end of midlist, giving barely-attended readings at Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic, despite her weirdly attentive agent Corey (Ismael Cruz Córdova), who appears to be her only friend.

Corey brings Lowen into a fateful meeting with Verity Crawford’s publisher. The author has been in a car accident, and her family is keeping the extent of the damage under wraps. As part of this initiative, Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) is overseeing the hiring of an author to help finish the remaining books in her series. (Though Lowen and Jeremy’s first encounter actually comes earlier, in a blood-spattered meet-weird for the ages.) Lowen is surprised and flattered to hear that she was Verity’s first choice for the job. Though she isn’t sure she can replicate the writer’s famous voice, she feels some kinship with the Crawford family, who are grieving another recent loss just as Lowen grapples with the death of her mother. That and a pile of money convinces her to accept the deal, which involves staying at the Crawford household in Vermont while she sorts through Verity’s meticulously detailed yet disorganized notes.

Upon her arrival at the Crawford home, Lowen realizes that Verity won’t be offering much input; she’s alive and breathing but catatonic. Lowen also finds a separate autobiographical manuscript, which is where Hathaway’s narration comes in, filling in the backstory between Verity and Jeremy. As Lowen gets further into Verity’s head, she could swear she catches Verity… looking at her? No, it couldn’t be. Could it?

Verity hinges on this gothic paranoia that Jeremy’s not-quite-ex from his not-quite-past may actually be watching as this usurper makes slightly bored-looking goo-goo eyes at her husband. It’s precisely the kind of atmospheric mystery that big studios and streamers alike consistently fail at, and by those current standards—a streaming-adjacent thriller for adults that oldheads will wish had been directed by Brian De Palma—Verity actually looks pretty good. The bizarre angles of Verity and Jeremy’s ridiculously well-appointed home jut out menacingly into the vast whiteness of the snowy wilderness that surrounds it, and Showalter at least seems to understand the difference between contrast-heavy shadows and plain old dimness.

Yet as a stylish clash of the contrasting brunettes to match The Housemaid’s battle of the blondes, Verity lopes around unevenly instead of building to a fever pitch. Johnson revives some of her Fifty Shades sexual-awakening routine; in other words, she’s the designated naked one while Hathaway serves as a kind of camp mascot, a vaunted guest star in her own movie. This is where the latter’s big-year ubiquity turns into a drawback; the tortured-artist drama of Mother Mary, meditation on storytelling of The Odyssey, and split-diopter fest of The End Of Oak Street all run rings around this movie’s style without even trying to. (Verity does have at least one split diopter shot, as any aspiring gothic-erotic thriller should.)

This might well be a limitation of Hoover’s novel; it wouldn’t be the first time a talented cast was ultimately subsumed by beach-read machinery that never creates a believably heightened alternate world, much less a suggestion of our own. Hathaway, Johnson, and Hartnett fare better than past Hoovered actors; they all seem aware that they can’t fight the story’s non-negotiable notes of strangeness, which tend to be more alien than truly haunting, and must lean into its abrupt curves instead. Game as they are, though, they’re unavoidably starring in the kind of movie that attempts to evoke ambiguity by having a character explain that they’re being ambiguous. Verity staves off resting boredom for most of its runtime; it’s too silly and starry to be a slog. But it also lacks the rigor of a genre workout, settling instead for mere exercise.

Director: Michael Showalter
Writer: Nick Antosca
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett
Release Date: October 2, 2026

 
Join the discussion...
Keep scrolling for more great stories.