Producers: Nick Antosca, Alex Hedlund, Stacey Sher, Michael Showalter, Jordana Mollick, Anne Hathaway and Colleen Hoover   Director: Michael Showalter   Screenplay: Nick Antosca   Cast: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Brady Wagner, Irina Dvorovenko, K.K. Moggie, Sienna Kulovitz, Michael Abbott Jr. and Alex Cooper   Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: D

The latest offering from the Colleen Hoover sausage factory is a departure from her usual fare of tortured, doom-laden romance, though there’s some of that here too.  “Verity” is a stab at a domestic thriller that seemingly wants to say something deep about the art of writing as well.  But it ends up being about as dumb a movie as one can imagine, as well as an excruciatingly boring one.  One suspects that director Michael Showalter might be trying to slyly subvert the obvious absurdity with some deadpan humor along the way, but if that was his intention, he’s failed.

Our dubious heroine is Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, dead-eyed and dreary), an aspiring but unsuccessful young author who’s summoned by Corey (Ismael Cruz Córdova), her agent, to an important meeting with bigwig editor Amanda Thomas (K. K. Moggie).  Walking along the NYC sidewalk to the publisher’s office, she bumps into, in the most opposite-of-cute encounter in recent memory, a handsome guy (Josh Hartnett, in this case the bland meeting the bland).  She’s splattered with blood from a vehicle accident, and he helps her clean up before proceeding to the all-important conference. (Neither, incidentally, confers with the police about what they’ve witnessed.)

The meeting turns out to be an offer to take over the writing of the latest novel by Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), whose popular series of thrillers told from the villain’s perspective is on hold because the author was seriously injured in an auto accident and is now in a coma, perhaps never to recover.  And who else is at the table?  None other than Verity’s husband Jeremy (Hartnett, of course).  Lowen is initially hesitant, but the money’s good, and Jeremy’s a heartthrob.

So Lowen goes off to the remote Crawford lakeside estate in snowy Vermont to collect Verity’s notes and drafts in preparation for completing the book and, it’s suggested, continuing the series.  She meets the Crawfords’ shy little son Crew (Brady Wagner, a pleasant kid) as well as Anna (Irina Dvorovenko), Verity’s grim-faced caregiver, who seems poised to be a kind of Mrs. Danvers, though nothing comes of it.  Of course, Lowen and Jeremy grow close as time goes on—he encourages her to stay and complete writing the book at Verity’s desk—and she begins having sultry dreams of being with him before they actually jump into bed. 

But while puttering about the place Lowen comes across something else, a supposedly autobiographical piece by Verity in which she admits her jealousy over the attention Jeremy’s paying to their newborn twins Crew and Harper (Sienna Kulovitz) and her guilt in Harper’s “accidental” drowning.  She also indicates her intention to commit suicide by crashing her car into a tree, which is in fact how she was injured.  Making matters more sinister is Lowen’s suspicion that Verity is feigning her coma, which leads her to question Crew on the subject, with disastrous results, and putting a nanny-cam in Verity’s room, with even more disastrous ones. 

It wouldn’t be fair to be too explicit about the further plot twists, though Hoover fans, who will presumably make up the bulk of the audience, will hardly be surprised by them, as the script by Nick Antosca doesn’t stray far from the book.  Suffice it to say that they’re all played out with a somber seriousness that even occasional flashes of vitality and seductiveness can’t rescue.  Showalter and editor Jay Cassidy seem to think that funereal pacing suits this material; they’re wrong. 

What it needs is the kind of lurid energy that marked a similarly twisty recent melodrama, Paul Feig’s “The Housemaid” from last year.  It had its flaws, but the adaptation of Freida McFadden’s 2022 book at least had the courage to play its “Sleeping with the Enemy”-style plot with unabashed joy at its ridiculousness.  Even something it shares with “Verity”—the utter obtuseness of the cops investigating unusual deaths—was played for laughs, while here the only chuckles are of the sardonic variety. 

And it gave its stars the opportunity to go for broke.  Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried went all out in the lead roles, and Brandon Sklenar chewed the scenery with gusto as the man both coveted.  Not so in this case.  Johnson and Hartnett are hardly actors you’d expect to blow you away—they’re both too dull for that—but Anne Hathaway is another matter.  She’s encumbered, of course, by the fact that she must play most of her scenes immobile, never an invitation to histrionics.  But she’s given plenty of flashbacks, for instance multiple interviews with podcasters like Alex Cooper (playing herself), and all she manages in them is an occasional wicked smirk to go along with her admitted gorgeousness.  She even adds little to a centrally important flashback in which Thomas urges her to think herself into the persona of her villains to make them come alive in her writing.

And what writing!  Presumably we’re meant to find the innumerable bits of her prose that are run across the screen (and recited ad nauseum, to tedious effect, by Hathaway) as windows into Verity’s talent, but they’re dreary potboiler stuff, redolent of the “airport books” that Lowen contemptuously dismisses—before, of course, she begins to emulate it for the cash and romance.  The notion that this is a person for whom writing is some sort of artistic calling is one of the movie’s most preposterous elements.  (Of course, Hoover probably sees her own work as a noble vocation, too.)

It remains to note that the movie is handsomely produced on a medium budget likely to assure its financial success.  Amy Williams’ production design is pretty sumptuous—the only really important piece is the Crawford house, which is imposing and elegantly appointed (though the bathtub, one must admit, looks uncomfortable as well as ugly), and cinematographer Jim Frohna shoots it in shiny, mellow tones.  Volker Bertelman’s moody score tries to create suspense where none exists, and does the usual in the periodic jump scares.                            

Devotees of pulp novels and films noirs know that their plots can be nonsensical, but also that they can be redeemed with style and wit, whether on the page or the screen.  But here the ludicrousness is untainted by any such devices.  Verily, “Verity” is very bad.