Partway through Verity, Dakota Johnson’s protagonist, well on her way to seducing her employer’s husband (played by Josh Hartnett), takes a bite out of a birthday cupcake he’s given her, leaving frosting smeared all over her movie star lips. “You’ve got a little something…,” Hartnett says, politely. She asks, “Where?” Cut to Hartnett offering the dead-eyed thousand-yard stare of a man who’s left his soul behind in some combat zone or something. It’s a profoundly stupid moment in a profoundly stupid film, but one of the only elements of amusement in the entire affair, illustrative of a work that springs to life only when something inept is happening.
Johnson plays young novelist Lowen. One day, on her way to an important meeting at a publishing house and just after witnessing a horrible accident involving a cyclist getting splattered all over both the car that hit him and Lowen’s outfit, she meets Jeremy (Hartnett), who helps her clean up and get to the meeting on time. Turns out the meeting is with him, and if you think you know where this is going, you’re wrong — this violent opening with its absurd contrivance is in fact just a coincidence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie at all. But as it happens, Jeremy is the husband of famous writer Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who has since been rendered completely catatonic due to a car accident, and the publisher needs a ghost writer to continue the gravy train. Lowen moves into the family’s lush Vermont mansion to pore over Verity’s notes and get cracking on the newest novel, all the while becoming more and more suspicious that things are not entirely as they seem. She thinks she spies Verity peering through windows and hears someone moving at night. Things are compounded when Lowen finds a manuscript detailing, in first person, Verity’s murder of her young daughter Harper.
If that all sounds like a needlessly convoluted but not particularly interesting or novel story, well, bingo. Based on but the most recent Colleen Hoover novel to be tapped for adaptation, none of the supposed twists and turns of the script (by Nick Antosca, recently of the immensely more satisfyingly bonkers Cape Fear series adaptation for Apple) are in the least bit surprising. For the most part, the big reveals are all saved for the final 20 minutes and delivered in a patience-testing series of expository flashbacks and voiceovers. What’s supposed to sustain this thing for most of its runtime is the sexy star chemistry of Johnson and Hartnett in a tawdry, will-they-or-of-course-they-will dance of seduction. But other than a superfluous scene in which Lowen rubs one out in the tub while fantasizing about her boss’ husband, the slivers of erotic thriller offered up aren’t even as hot as a 40-year-old episode of Red Shoe Diaries. Director Michael Showalter (of all people) keeps things extremely televisual, with a lot of shallow focus and simple close-ups. In an apparent attempt to goose Verity‘s aesthetic character, there’s occasionally a dumb split diopter composition, and the film features an excessive amount of shots passing over text on a page (inexplicably digitally generated).
Hartnett, at least, largely gets away clean, doing double duty as the sad-sack single dad to the couple’s remaining son and possibly a villainous cheating husband. He’s doing exactly what he’s told, and it works well enough for the material. Johnson, for her part, gives the exact same performance she offers in every single film in which she appears: as an alien in a person suit, desperately trying to figure out what these strange humans are thinking and doing. Questions like “What is food?” and “Why do they walk places instead of floating gracefully?” dance across Johnson’s face as she struggles to find a human emotion motivated by something as simple as discovering your comatose employer may have drowned a child. At least poor Anne Hathaway, having an incredible heater of a 2026, gets to stay in bed for most of the movie, because none of this is tawdry, surprising, or indeed sexy enough to justify these sad performances, the sluggish pace, or the sloppy writing. The sad irony is that Verity is more likely to leave the viewer catatonic than to titillate.
DIRECTOR: Michael Showalter; CAST: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Brady Wagner; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: October 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
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