I picked Verity almost at random, the way I sometimes choose a film when I have no particular appetite for sorting through another thirty thumbnails. I knew it was a thriller, and that was about it. No reading up on the source novel, no watching six promotional interviews, no attempt to guess the twist before the opening titles. Just a film for the night, which is a perfectly reasonable way to encounter something that turns out to be all kinds of fucked up.
The three leads immediately made the evening more interesting. Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett each bring a different sort of unease to a story about a successful novelist, the woman hired to complete her books, and a husband who seems to be carrying an impossible amount of grief. By the time the film is finished, I’d stopped asking which of them was telling the truth and started wondering whether any of them had a useful relationship with it.
Some thrillers solve a mystery so neatly that you can practically hear the scriptwriter closing the filing cabinet. Verity, directed by Michael Showalter, leaves both drawers open. It shows us a hideous account of what happened in the Crawford family, then produces another account that changes the meaning of almost everything we’ve seen. Whether that ambiguity is ingenious or simply very convenient is part of the aftertaste. Major spoilers follow.
A Literary Job Offer with Terrible Working Conditions
Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) isn’t introduced as a woman having an especially good run of things. She’s an author whose career has stalled, with financial worries and an uncertain future. The film’s opening gives her a shocking brush with street violence and a chance encounter with Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), a man who seems reassuringly kind in circumstances where kindness is badly needed. It is a sufficiently strange first meeting that I wondered whether fate or a screenwriter with very little patience was arranging their introduction.
Lowen is subsequently offered the job of finishing the bestselling series written by Jeremy’s wife, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway). Verity has apparently been left profoundly incapacitated after a car accident, so the publishers need another writer to continue her lucrative work. Lowen will be paid properly, offered professional recognition and given access to Verity’s notes. The one condition is that she stays at the Crawford family’s remote house while sorting through the material, which sounds less like a working arrangement than the first paragraph of an unusually expensive police report.
She takes the job, of course. What interests me is that the film doesn’t entirely present the decision as foolish. Lowen has genuine reasons for accepting, and the promise of becoming a more successful writer is difficult to separate from the attraction of becoming part of Jeremy’s world. Ambition is already sitting at the table long before the most unsettling documents turn up.
Dakota Johnson: A Witness with Something to Gain
Johnson plays Lowen with a deliberate reserve that makes her an effective focal point for a mystery built out of observation and suspicion. She notices things, reacts quietly and often lets a scene hang just long enough for an ordinary household detail to become threatening. Her underplaying can occasionally look like passivity, but I think it works for someone who is simultaneously frightened by what she is discovering and tempted by the life that might be opening up for her.
She’s supposed to be writing Verity’s books, yet almost everything else she does involves moving into Verity’s position. She studies the woman’s private thoughts, occupies the rooms in her house, grows close to her husband and gradually becomes less willing to consider the possibility that her rival might not be the monster described in the manuscript. Lowen isn’t a neutral investigator. She’s a participant whose wishes increasingly colour the evidence, and that makes her far more interesting than the usual innocent outsider who happens to wander into a sinister family.
By the end, Lowen has a successful book, a future with Jeremy and a child on the way. She also knows more than she is prepared to reveal. That last detail matters: her greatest transformation isn’t the professional one but her discovery that she, too, can edit the story when telling the truth would cost her something.
Anne Hathaway: The Most Frightening Person in the Room Might Be Sitting Still
Hathaway has the most flamboyant role in the film, even though much of her time on screen involves doing almost nothing. In the early glimpses of Verity as a celebrated author, she’s polished, commanding and knowingly glamorous. She understands the performance of literary celebrity, from the clothes to the interviews to the calculated confidence that makes the audience lean towards her. Once we’re inside the house, she’s apparently reduced to a silent presence in a wheelchair, unable to control even the basic routines of daily life.
That contrast gives the performance its charge. A tiny movement, an uncertain expression or the suggestion that Verity might be looking back at Lowen becomes more disturbing than a conventional jump scare. Her stillness forces us to scrutinise the background, which is precisely what the film wants. When the manuscript supplies a version of Verity as possessive, jealous and violent, Hathaway can make that version convincing too, creating two performances whose incompatibility is the point rather than a flaw.
Eventually, we learn that Verity has been pretending to be incapacitated. The easy conclusion is that the deception proves every other accusation. But it doesn’t. It proves she lied about one crucial thing, not why she lied, and the film’s most effective trick is making it difficult to remember that distinction after you’ve already spent an hour fearing her.
Josh Hartnett and the Extremely Persuasive Grieving Husband
Hartnett makes Jeremy sympathetic enough that I could understand Lowen’s attraction to him, which is essential for a story that needs the audience to overlook a considerable amount of troubling behaviour. He’s handsome, attentive and seemingly devastated by the death of his daughter. He appears to be maintaining a home, caring for his surviving son and living alongside a wife from whom any ordinary intimacy has been taken away. The performance gives him warmth without entirely removing the feeling that something is withheld.
The awkward reality is that his involvement with Lowen is questionable almost immediately. Verity is still alive in the house. Jeremy’s grief may be genuine, and his marriage may be in ruins, but that doesn’t make a new relationship with the woman working in his wife’s private archive particularly admirable. Hartnett is good enough to make us grant Jeremy more latitude than his actions deserve, which becomes uncomfortable when we realise how much of our judgement depends on his appearance and his version of events.
If the final letter is truthful, Jeremy is far more calculated and dangerous than he initially seems. If it isn’t, he’s still a man who helps commit a killing and conceal it. Neither interpretation exactly qualifies him for a husband-of-the-year award, although the film is clever about how long it takes us to stop considering him a reassuring presence.
The Manuscript That Looks Like Evidence
The discovery of Verity’s private manuscript, So Be It, is the story’s central disturbance. Lowen finds what appears to be an autobiographical account describing a relationship with Jeremy that has curdled into obsession, resentment towards their children and eventually the apparent confession that Verity deliberately caused the death of her young daughter, Harper. These passages are difficult material, not simply because of their cruelty but because the narrator seems to explain the worst acts with an unnervingly ordinary fluency.
What makes the film more slippery than a straightforward confession mystery is the way it dramatises these pages. We see events from the manuscript as lavish, emotionally persuasive flashbacks. Once an allegation has been turned into moving images, it’s difficult not to treat it as something we’ve witnessed. Yet those scenes aren’t independent evidence; they’re pictures generated by a written account that Lowen is reading, and the trustworthiness of that account is exactly what remains in dispute.
That is a nice piece of cinematic misdirection. Film usually gives flashbacks the authority of fact unless it explicitly signals otherwise. Verity exploits that habit, then asks us to reconsider whether we were watching the past or simply watching an exceptionally accomplished storyteller make an invented past feel real.
A Family Tragedy Beneath the Sensationalism
However seductive the romantic intrigue and wealthy-household atmosphere might be, the children’s story is what makes the film genuinely unpleasant. Harper is dead, her twin brother Crew (Brady Wagner) has survived, and the adults around him keep turning his experiences into evidence for whichever explanation they prefer. If the manuscript tells the truth, the cruelty towards the children is appalling. If the letter tells the truth, grief and fear have been weaponised to justify further violence. Neither account offers much comfort.
Crew is not merely a device for keeping the audience uncertain, although the screenplay sometimes treats him that way. He is the person least equipped to understand the competing narratives and the person whose life has already been most damaged by them. His odd moments of knowledge and fear make Lowen suspect that Verity can move or speak, but they also reveal how little the adults have done to create a safe environment for him.
I found myself wishing the film would linger with those consequences rather than occasionally racing back towards its erotic-thriller machinery. The family tragedy is much uglier than the luxury surrounding it, and the story is at its strongest when it remembers that a child’s death isn’t simply a useful clue to be rearranged for the final twist.
A House Worth Admiring, Though Not Staying In
From a design perspective, the Crawford residence is almost unfairly attractive. Its steeply angled roof forms, timber interiors, extensive glazing and carefully arranged furniture suggest an architectural magazine whose occupants have somehow wandered into the wrong genre. It is beautiful in the way that slightly intimidating houses can be beautiful, with every surface apparently chosen by someone who knows exactly what a piece of furniture ought to cost.
The real location is Beckoning Path in Armonk, New York, designed by Danish designer Jens Quistgaard. Production designer Amy Williams and location manager Elizabeth Krekel found the property and used it to establish the film’s visual identity, then created additional interiors for production. In an interview about the design, Williams explains how the existing timber, copper and stone surfaces informed the sets, and how the angular shapes were extended into the bedrooms and writing spaces.
The house is an excellent metaphor without needing to become a particularly subtle one. Its architecture promises order, taste and financial security, while the inhabitants are almost entirely incapable of honesty. In its large windows and beautifully controlled interiors there is a feeling of exposure rather than freedom. I spent a surprising amount of time examining the rooms, wondering how anyone could make a place that attractive seem so uncomfortable. The Crawfords are apparently very good at it.
Red Dresses, Mirrors and the Pleasure of Old-Fashioned Suspense
Showalter and cinematographer Jim Frohna have spoken about their interest in Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, and the connection is visible in the film’s polished but faintly lurid visual language. The drama of looking, the possibility that a watcher is being watched, the attraction to someone who may be dangerous, and the beautiful interiors that become traps all belong to an older tradition of adult psychological thrillers. A little Rebecca, a little Body Double, a trace of the sort of expensive moral disaster that filled cinema screens in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I have a certain affection for that tradition. Those films weren’t all masterpieces, and plenty of them treated common sense as an optional accessory, but they understood that a character’s desire could be the thing preventing them from recognising danger. Verity borrows the formula without apologising for it, then gives it an unusually glossy contemporary finish. Frohna used the Sony VENICE 2 and a mixture of modern and tungsten lighting to create an environment in which the present and the manuscript’s heightened recollections can feel subtly different.
The costumes and colours contribute just as much. Verity’s striking reds and controlled public appearance distinguish her from Lowen’s initially less assured presentation, while mirrors and visual echoes suggest the younger writer gradually taking possession of another woman’s identity. The more cinematic the memories appear, the less certain we should be of their factual status. It’s a useful contradiction for a film about people who are professionally skilled at making stories persuasive.
The Score, the Songs and the Mood of a Bad Decision
Volker Bertelmann’s original score works beneath the surface of much of the film, adding anxiety rather than constantly demanding attention. Bertelmann has demonstrated elsewhere, including All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, how sound can become a physical pressure within a scene. Here his music helps make quiet rooms and apparently harmless movements feel slightly suspect, which is a more appropriate strategy than announcing every ominous glance with a dramatic flourish.
The soundtrack also reaches outside conventional suspense scoring. Songs associated with FKA twigs, Kali Uchis, Oklou, Benny Goodman and Curtis Mayfield contribute to a world that is both glamorous and faintly dislocated. I wouldn’t describe the music as the film’s most memorable feature, but its mixture of contemporary mood and older recordings reinforces the impression of an updated thriller whose instincts belong to another era. It is confident enough, at least, to let uncomfortable silences do some of the work.
The Ending: The Manuscript, the Letter and a Murder
Once Lowen is convinced that Verity’s manuscript describes what really happened to Harper, she shares it with Jeremy. The confrontation reveals that Verity has been pretending to be incapacitated, and Jeremy kills her, with Lowen complicit in what follows. They dispose of the body in the lake and present her death as a tragic accident. This is the point where the film’s moral landscape becomes impossible to tidy up: whatever you believe about the manuscript, Lowen and Jeremy have taken part in a killing and a cover-up.
Then the film moves forward and Lowen discovers Verity’s letter, which presents an almost complete inversion of the story we’ve accepted. Verity claims that the manuscript was a writing exercise in adopting a villain’s point of view, that Harper’s death was accidental and that Jeremy had already found the pages, taken them literally and attempted to murder his wife by engineering the car crash. Under that account, Verity’s apparent paralysis was not a cruel game but a desperate attempt to protect herself and survive until she could escape with Crew.
The letter doesn’t make Verity innocent; it makes her potentially innocent. That’s a distinction worth preserving. It also makes Jeremy’s behaviour newly alarming and casts Lowen’s part in Verity’s death in an appalling light. Lowen could challenge the new account, investigate its claims or expose the document. Instead, she conceals and destroys the evidence, choosing the future she has built with Jeremy over reopening the past. The mystery survives, but her decision is no mystery at all.
Team Manuscript, Team Letter, or Team Nobody
I understand the temptation to choose a side. Readers of Colleen Hoover’s novel have been discussing Team Manuscript and Team Letter since the book’s publication, and the adaptation deliberately keeps the argument going. The manuscript has the force of detailed apparent confession, the letter has the force of a plausible defence, and both are written by somebody with a powerful interest in how events will be remembered. Neither can be treated as an independent witness.
Jeremy’s apparent surprise when he reads the pages seems to support one account, while Verity’s prolonged deception seems to support another. But both observations are unreliable foundations for certainty: we’re being guided through the perceptions of Lowen, whose judgement has been compromised by desire and professional ambition from the beginning. Her interpretation is not neutral, and the film never offers a clean vantage point from which to verify either document.
I don’t feel especially compelled to pick a winner. The more interesting question is why I wanted Jeremy to be decent and Lowen to be justified even when their choices were becoming indefensible. An attractive face, a persuasive explanation and an aesthetically impeccable home turn out to be remarkably effective ways of making horrible conduct seem reasonable. I suspect the film knows that about its audience.
From Colleen Hoover’s Novel to the Screen
Hoover first published Verity in 2018, moving away from the romantic fiction with which many readers associated her name and into much darker domestic-thriller territory. The novel’s success and persistent ending debate made it suitable material for a film, but a two-hour adaptation cannot carry every narrative complication. The screen version, directed by Showalter from Nick Antosca’s screenplay based on Hoover’s novel, concentrates the story around the three main adults and the surviving child.
Several conspicuous elements were changed. The novel gives the Crawford family three children, while the film centres the tragedy on twins Harper and Crew. Lowen’s sleepwalking and some of the novel’s more extreme material are removed. The film also stages a different concealment after Verity’s death, with the lake becoming central to the cover story. Those choices make the narrative more streamlined, though they also simplify some of the clues available to readers trying to decide which written account is true.
There’s a small pleasure in discovering a story like this without having read the book, as I did. I had no prior allegiance to either interpretation and no checklist of scenes I expected to see. It also meant that the ending arrived as an argument I hadn’t already been having for eight years, which is probably the best way for an adaptation built on uncertainty to find a new viewer.
What Works, and What I Had to Overlook
The three performances are the reason I’d recommend Verity to someone in the mood for a dark thriller. Hathaway gives the title character both theatrical glamour and an unnerving physical restraint. Johnson allows Lowen to become compromised without turning her into an obvious villain, while Hartnett makes Jeremy’s charm part of the uncertainty rather than an argument for his innocence. The house and its carefully shaped visual world deserve almost equal billing, because they establish the film’s strange mixture of attraction and dread.
Where I struggled was with the speed at which certain moral and professional boundaries vanish. Lowen makes choices that would be questionable in a relatively ordinary workplace, never mind a household where a supposedly incapacitated woman is being cared for. The supporting characters have too little room to challenge what the central trio are telling us, and the final act needs several enormous decisions to happen before the consequences can be properly absorbed. The twists sometimes feel engineered rather than inevitable.
That isn’t necessarily fatal for this particular kind of film. The older erotic thrillers that Verity recalls were frequently outrageous, and part of their appeal was watching accomplished people make spectacularly bad decisions in attractive surroundings. I wanted a bit more plausibility in places, but I was never bored, and I can’t say the central question stopped bothering me when the credits appeared.
The Truth Is the One Thing Nobody Can Afford
I didn’t expect my random film choice to end with a discussion about evidence, authorship and the convenience of choosing what to believe. I expected a thriller; I got three thoroughly compromised people in a stunning house, each with a reason to tell the story differently. The ending can be read as an elegant refusal to impose certainty or as a convenient refusal to answer the question the film has spent so long asking. I’m still somewhere between those positions.
What stays with me isn’t simply whether Verity murdered her daughter, whether Jeremy invented the role of grieving husband or whether Lowen was manipulated. It’s the way the people who survive are willing to let an uncertain version of events become official because the alternative would destroy the lives they’ve arranged for themselves. For a film that occasionally strains credibility, that’s a disconcertingly recognisable piece of human behaviour.
My rating: 7/10. Good performances, a remarkably photogenic setting, more than a few unlikely decisions and a deeply unpleasant story that refuses to tell me which explanation I’m supposed to accept. Not quite as clever as it wants to be, perhaps, but it certainly made an impression.
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