Verity Review: Anne Hathaway’s Colleen Hoover Movie Is Dead On Arrival

Is Michael Showalter … okay? The versatile comedian and director of films like “The Big Sick,” “The Idea of You,” and “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” — and director and even co-creator on shows like “The Dropout” and “Search Party” — is better than you’d believe if you only see his new film, “Verity,” a Colleen Hoover adaptation that stars Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett as two writers and just some guy locked in a deadly love triangle.

I will admit this: I can’t stand Colleen Hoover’s writing. I think that she commits the ultimate sin of being both boring and a bad writer; frankly, you have to pick a lane at a certain point. (Freida McFadden’s thrillers, which are easily comparable, are written at a fifth-grade level but at least feature some fun plots.) Amazingly, “Verity” is … probably Hoover’s best novel, which isn’t saying a whole lot. So what’s going on here, and why does this movie stink so much?

The gist: the absurdly named Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), a published but struggling author, witnesses a fatal car accident one day in New York City and, after she’s covered in a dead biker’s blood, accepts a change of a shirt from a handsome stranger. As it happens, that handsome stranger is Jeremy Crawford (Hartnett), who shows up to Lowen’s meeting at the legendary publishing house Hachette to accept an offer to finish a thriller series by best-selling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), also a stupid name-haver. As it turns out, Jeremy is keeping a big secret: as Lowen learns, Verity is catatonic after a car crash and a separate accident that killed her eight-year-old daughter, and Lowen must finish her popular series completely alone. Add in her suspicions of Verity herself, and you’ve got … honestly? A boring movie.

Not to flex, but I more or less walked off a transatlantic flight and into my “Verity” screening, and multiple times during the movie I asked my friend if I died on the plane and was experiencing some sort of fever dream. For most of the movie, the pacing is that of a particularly sleepy snail, with characters muttering highly-dramatic exposition at each other or Dakota Johnson gamely looking scared as she reads a page of a manuscript she finds that seems to contain a confession of murder. It is, above all and unfortunately, exceedingly dull, which is a shame. Not only did I go into this film hoping that Michael Showalter could elevate the material — and I’ll circle back to that shortly — with his comedy bonafides, I thought it would at least be dishy and fun. Unfortunately, it was neither of those things! For a film with a run time of one hour and 58 minutes, I sure did check my watch a lot.

Truly, there were two exciting moments in my screening of “Verity.” One was a fun jump scare that I won’t spoil here, showing that Showalter still has an ounce of comedic timing. Another was a guy going “oh wow” very loudly during a pivotal plot reveal, which made my whole theater laugh. Sadly, I cannot guarantee that that one guy will go to every “Verity” screening. (Amazon, if you’re reading this, hire him.) If there’s one actually good thing I’ll say about “Verity,” it is this: Anne Hathaway really is one of the greatest performers of our time.

If Anne Hathaway hadn’t played the titular role in “Verity,” there are even odds I would have walked out. I am a Dakota Johnson defender through and through, but she’s given very little to work with; after seeing Josh Hartnett’s triumphant turn as Cooper Abbott in “Trap,” I love him as a performer but, similarly, he is given essentially nothing to go on here. Hathaway gets all the meat in “Verity,” and she makes a twelve-course price-fix meal out of it. 

The crux of “Verity” is that, apparently instead of devoting her time to doing the job she was asked to do, Lowen finds a manuscript of an autobiography hidden away on a thumb drive in Verity’s desk that details her courtship with Jeremy, their relationship and subsequent marriage, and the birth of their twins Harper and Crew. (Crew, the only one alive in the main narrative, is played by Brady Wagner.) As Lowen reads, we are, at least, treated to live flashbacks performed by an all-too-game Hathaway, whose considerable talents are wasted here but at least fleetingly fun to watch. Hathaway is also a master of timing and micro-expressions at this point in her career; all of the jumpscares are caused by her, and the particularly effective one I mentioned is less a credit to director Michael Showalter and far more to Hathaway, who makes a miniscule physical choice that actually had me jumping out of my seat. Hathaway is deliciously evil here in an ode to “Gone Girl’s” anti-heroine Amy Elliott Dunne, and even as the narrative of “Verity” drags itself to the bottom of a proverbial lake, Hathaway stays excellent. It’s truly a credit to her talent that she makes parts of this movie watchable.

I think that, in a different world, a movie like “Verity” could have been fun and campy … but it’s stuck with its source material, so that world is simply not possible. While director Paul Feig made truly satisfying camp films with similarly sapphic undertones like “A Simple Favor” and “The Housemaid,” both of which are also based on lackluster novels (by Darcey Bell and the aforementioned Freida McFadden, respectively), Michael Showalter seems much more tied to every single beat of Colleen Hoover’s book, and it does the movie zero favors. It’s been a few years since I hatefully speed-read “Verity,” but there’s little to no deviation, which leaves very little room for Showalter to have any fun here. (To Showalter’s credit, he did cut a scene from the novel where Verity gets bad news while washing a raw chicken. Not only should you not wash raw chicken, I low-key hate Hoover for burning that image into my brain, especially because the passage ends with “I vomited on the chicken.”)

Instead, the whole time, you are entirely aware that you are watching “A Colleen Hoover Movie.” The drama and stakes are, we’re told, high, but they feel dull and toothless most of the time, and everyone has absolutely absurd names that drag you out of the story. (In a hilariously self-aggrandizing move, all of Verity’s book covers look exactly like Colleen Hoover’s with a little bit of “Gone Girl” thrown in, I guess as an ode to a better thriller novel.) At the end of the day, there’s no bad news for Amazon MGM Studios, who distributed this film and will likely end up raking in beaucoup bucks at the box office. 

In the paraphrased words of a man I truly despise, we have to shut down this whole Colleen Hoover movie adaptation thing until we can figure out what’s going on. “It Ends With Us” made a ton of money but objectively sucks and led to one of the ugliest celebrity legal battles in recent memory. “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him” are dull and forgettable, but again, they made money at the box office. Herein lies the problem. Like it or not, there’s a demand for Hoover adaptations, and her fans — forgive me for this — hoover them right up.

In fact, at my screening, the audience clapped when “Verity” ended, stunning me into somewhat rare silence. My friend and I blinked, chuckled at each other, and walked into the night to giggle about how much we didn’t like it. What bums me out on a larger level, though, is that this is the kind of thriller directed at women that we’re getting; gone are the days where a big-budget female-led thriller like “Gone Girl” or, hell, even “Basic Instinct” would grace our screens. I can sit here and dream of a Hoover adaptation moratorium all I want. Instead, we’ll see which brunette superstar she enlists for her next fever dream project. Ultimately, “Verity” is barely a movie; it’s a series of montages in which beautiful people whisper at each other, have extremely passionate sex, commit murder, and snarl menacingly while Dakota Johnson reads aloud from a manuscript that might as well be called “The Exposition.” It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.

/Film Rating: 2 out of 10

“Verity” opens in theaters on October 2, 2026.