“Verity”
The movie version of “Verity,” Colleen Hoover’s hackneyed page lift of Daphne du Maurier’s great 1938 Gothic psycho thriller “Rebecca,” has an all-star cast that may not be enough to give the romance novelist a fourth box office success.
Some of that is due to the source material. Where du Maurier understood and gave shape to corrupt and conflicted souls, Hoover’s works play like soulless connect-the-dots exercises, and come off that way on screen. The script by Nick Antosca is unfortunately too loyal to Hoover’s novel, and director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick” and “The Idea of You”) is merely a serviceable filmmaker with a knack for small, cloistered melodrama. (In contrast, du Maurier’s was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, and won the Oscar for Best Picture.)
The cast, though, is an impressive assemblage, led by Anne Hathaway as the titular Verity Crawford, a wildly successful author who pens dark psychological thrillers by, for and about women (art imitating life?). It’s her fifth movie this year, and this is the one she’d probably hope people forget. Josh Hartnett plays her hunky husband and Dakota Johnson, who unfortunately regresses from her breakout in “The Lost Daughter” (2021) to her cinematic roots in the kinky sex nonsense “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015).
Johnson’s Lowen Ashleigh is, like Verity, an author, but more literary. She’s also struggling financially; we meet her at a small independent bookstore in Manhattan reading to an audience of three. Later, as she’s packing up the apartment she’s being evicted from, her agent (Ismael Cruz Cordova) tells her of a big opportunity at publisher Hachette. Lowen dresses up and heads to the meeting, only to be spattered by blood when a cyclist is struck by a streaking car just feet away. Before she can even react, a chivalrous stranger (Hartnett) swoops in to literally give her the shirt off his back so she can go to her meeting. And after Lowen signs the NDA so she can learn about the offer, in walks Hartnett’s Jeremy, to tell her his wife, the famous author Verity, just had a car accident, is paralyzed and can’t speak. So Hachette wants to pay Lowen some good buck to ghost write Verity’s series.
Lowen, we learn, has just lost her mother and is financial duress as well as facing eviction, so the huge offer is a boon. The loss is also another superficial bonding point for Lowen and Jeremy, whose daughter Harper (Sienna Kulovitz) drowned in a recent canoeing accident at the lake in Vermont where they live.
Under the deal, Lowen’s going to live there, too. The palatial abode, an architectural wonder with peaked glass gables, is perhaps the most alluring and engaging character in the film.
All this action happens in the first minutes of the film. Once we get to Vermont, we see a lot of Lowen pouring over Verity’s notes and manuscripts, while Jeremy performs the caring father/husband thing for the invalid Verity and their sheepish son, Crew (Brady Wagner) who survived the canoe tragedy.
Hathaway as Verity spends much of the film largely inert, either bed- or wheelchair-bound. It was sad to watch Hathaway, so entertaining this year in her other films, sitting on the thespian sideline when she is by far the best actor in the room. We do get some flashbacks of Verity looking fab as Lowen meanders through an autobiographical manuscript that she finds on a concealed thumb drive. But the text raises questions about Verity as mother and wife. It’s implied that certain tragedies might not have been accidental and her relationship not such a great romance.
Inevitably, sparks begin to kindle between Jeremy and Lowen, and this is where Johnson seamlessly steps into her “Grey” days, all pursed lips and soft doe-ish eyes tightly framed by Showalter and cinematog Jim Frohna. But even with a scene of her naked in a rustic stoneware bath fantasizing about Jeremy, it’s a stilted slog that yields little for the plot. Then, Lowen thinks she sees Verity move. Is she faking being an invalid, or is it just a trick of Lowen’s overactive imagination?
What follows is a tightly packed crescendo of “not everything is what you think it is” mishigas. Not all of it fits congruently, but neither did it in the book either. And after sitting through near two hours of titillation and tease with three vacuous souls who do nothing to earn our empathy, it doesn’t matter, because it turns out the joke’s on us. The press screening I attended had a public audience of ticket pass winners. Hoots and hollers rippled through the crowd like a wave effort at Fenway, when there should have been hush and gapes.
Playing at Apple Cinemas Cambridge, AMC Assembly Row 12 and Kendall Square Cinema
This story was updated to add the name of the actress who played the twin daughter.
A stronger
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