Thriller has steam to spare, but story slogs

Based on a 2018 book by hugely popular, wildly polarizing author Colleen Hoover (whose novels It Ends with Us, Regretting You and Reminders of Him have also been made into movies), this new adaptation is being billed as a sexy psychological thriller.

There is sex — quite a lot of sex. As for those other descriptors, Verity is not only lacking in thrills. It’s almost laughably light on plausible human psychology.

Plausibility can be overrated, of course. Scripter Nick Antosca (2026’s Cape Fear) and director Michael Showalter (The Idea of You) could have thrown plausibility out the window and gone all-in on escapist fun.

But while there is a gorgeous modernist lake house and some excellent knitwear here, and Anne Hathaway, at least, seems to be having a ball with her deliciously two-faced role, Verity is mostly a sloggy mess, with draggy pacing, flat characters and a fatal lack of atmosphere.

Lowen (Fifty Shades of Grey’s Dakota Johnson) is a struggling author, penning niche literary thrillers that nobody reads.

She’s due at a conference with her New York publisher when she runs into Jeremy (Josh Hartnett of Trap). They don’t exactly have a “meet cute.” It’s more of a “meet gruesome” — a NYC street accident — followed by some oddly erotic trauma bonding over the recent deaths of Lowen’s mother and Jeremy’s eight-year-old daughter. (If this description sounds weird, it’s even weirder in the movie.)

When Lowen finally makes it to her conference, it turns out Jeremy is the husband of Verity Crawford (Hathaway), possibly “the bestselling author on the planet,” whose thrillers go to very dark places, always from the point of view of the sadistic sociopathic villain.

Jeremy wants to hire Lowen to help his wife, who is recovering from a car accident, complete her latest novel. Lowen is hesitant at first. She doesn’t even know Verity’s work. (“I don’t read books you can buy at an airport,” she says.)

But she badly needs the big payout, and she’s clearly intrigued by Jeremy.

Arriving at Jeremy and Verity’s Vermont home, Lowen is shocked to find out that Verity isn’t just dealing with writer’s block. She’s in a non-responsive state, unable to move or speak. Lowen is left to read through the notes and documents in Verity’s office, which include an intimate autobiographical account of her life with her husband and children.

Soon Lowen will be forced to balance shocking revelations with her growing attraction to Jeremy and her mounting suspicions that Verity is not what she seems.

Drawing on a gothic tradition that runs from Jane Eyre to Rebecca, this is a story of an isolated house, a young woman and an older man overshadowed by a mysterious past. But helmer Showalter has no idea how to craft mystery or create suspense, and the occasional hammy jump scare is not enough to keep the thriller narrative going.

As Jeremy, Hartnett draws on his good looks and his Minnesota-nice persona. Like a lot of Hoover’s men, he’s supposed to come off as an attractive guy who might be hiding something, but because of the weak writing, he just seems opaque.

Johnson, who’s something of an expert at making the most of terrible material (see the 2022 version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion), is likewise left with little to do. Lowen’s baffling non-responsiveness is explained away at one point by her telling Jeremy she has “resting bored face.”

Hathaway, on the other hand, radiates campy energy, Verity’s purring voice and physical charisma coming out in flashbacks and in interview clips with real-life media personalities Gayle King, Sean Evans and Alex Cooper. Hathaway plays her part with a wink, knowing that her character’s name, with its reference to truthfulness, is a bit of a tease.

And then there’s the “headboard-biting” sex. (If you’re a Hoover fan, you’ll know what this means.) There’s also a lot of counter sex — kitchen counters, bathroom counters.

It’s distracting, sure, but not distracting enough to compensate for Verity’s tepid mystery and queasy romance.

arts@freepress.mb.ca