'Verity' (2026): A Stellar Trio Can't Rescue a Formulaic Thriller
Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett deliver the goods, but a muted, padded, painfully familiar mystery never earns its twists.
Every Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us) adaptation I've watched has left me in roughly the same place: never entirely won over, never entirely checked out, with the final feeling depending on how much the story manages to surprise me along the way. Verity lands on the lower end of that shrug. Michael Showalter (The Idea of You) has put together a handsome, fully committed thriller that I couldn't summon much tension for – a movie I can acknowledge far more easily than I can enjoy.
The trouble is that I'd already seen this film not long ago. The Housemaid runs on nearly identical bones – a newcomer hired into a gorgeous home, a household hiding more than it shows, a first explanation that's obviously never the real one – so every beat in Verity arrived wearing a name tag, and I could call most of them well before the characters did. Even the late curveball, a twist stacked on top of a twist on top of another twist, is so convoluted and far-fetched that it plays more like noise than shock. I'm usually forgiving of movie logic issues, and I'll gladly follow nonsense anywhere if the ride is thrilling, but here the nonsense shows up without the adrenaline, and the final-minute reach for ambiguity feels bolted on.
Verity's direction is where my disappointment really settles. Showalter and screenwriter Nick Antosca (Channel Zero) keep the house immaculately cold and the melodrama sincere, yet nothing is ever wound tight enough to bite. The movie stays muted exactly where it needs a pulse, and tension was the one ingredient I kept wishing for. Is it trashy enough to be a guilty pleasure? Barely. Fun enough? Borderline. Sexy enough? Same answer, since each box gets ticked just lightly enough that none of them feels like a choice. Worse, scenes that should begin, build, and end instead pause for padding, then resume and wind up exactly where they were already headed a couple of minutes earlier, which turns a runtime just shy of two hours into something that feels considerably longer.
The cast, at least, gives me nothing to complain about. Dakota Johnson (Materialists) is the closest thing to a true protagonist and stays compelling throughout, and her chemistry with Josh Hartnett (Oppenheimer) is convincing enough to carry the film's more heated stretches, just as it is with Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada). Hathaway, though, plays in a league of her own: spending most of the runtime in a bed or a wheelchair, surfacing in "visions" and flashbacks, she still shows off a range that makes you wish the movie around her matched her ambition. All three are wonderful casting choices who deserve a sharper thriller.
I do like the setting, and I respect how wholeheartedly the film commits to its drama and its twists. However, I wish that energy had been pointed somewhere unfamiliar. There's a certain irony in a story about a ghostwriter, someone paid to channel another person's voice, being undone by how faithfully it channels everyone else's. Maybe Hollywood should start looking at other authors to adapt their works to the big screen...
Rating: C
