The twists and turns in Verity may resemble a rollercoaster but the ride is a fun one with some silly stops along the way
VERITY (2026)
★★ & 1/2 ★ of ★★★★★ stars
Verity is a fun movie with a premise that takes a minute to really lock-in on. We have Lowen (Dakota Johnson channeling Anastasia Steele here by design) a writer struggling to make ends meet who is contacted by Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and the book agency representing his wife Verity (Anne Hathaway). They want to hire Lowen to ghost write the conclusion to Verity’s best selling series of novels which are reknown for being graphic and written from the villains point of view. Lowen struggles with this decision but takes it on as she and Jeremy had shared the world’s most gruesome meet-cute prior to the start of the novel where a bicyclicst is run down brutally in front of them and they bond over wipping his bloody guts off their clothing. A lot of what the fuck just happened events take place in this film in that vein that are horrifically traumatic but are just trated as every day stuff you gloss over in this film. But oddly enough, that’s what makes the movie entertaining. It’s in this “50 Shades of Grey” zeitgeist where it sucks you in. Verity it turns out may also by a sociopath who murdered her daughter because Jeremy wasn’t attentive enough after their pregnancy in a secret manuscript that Lowen finds and also Verity is also in a catatonic stupor from another accident after THAT event. Is Verity a murderer or is Lowen being used as a replacement goldfish for Verity so Jeremy can have another lovely brunette author under his thumb as he slowly charms Lowen to love him.
Again, this could make Verity a cheesy or terrible movie in many filmmakers hands. But Hartnett lands the right kind of boyish devilish charm to make you think he’s a pawn in his wife’s games. We only meet Hathaway’s Verity in voiceovers and clips of appearances on talk shows but we see she might be akin to the antagonist in Gone Girl at times, or also perhaps an unwitting victim of her success as a writer who channels sociopaths. Johnson knocks it out as the ingenue who doesn’t know what to beleive and her genuineness is what makes the film work. The world around Verity is crazy but when the heroine is just as lost as we are as the viewer, it does give you some bearings in this crazy world. I enjoyed it on that level, others will like it as a date night movie. Verity hits theaters now.