I was counting down the days until Verity hit theaters. A twisty Colleen Hoover thriller starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett sounded like a sure thing. When I finally saw it, though, I walked out with mixed feelings — and it took me a while to figure out why.
At first, I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing. Then it clicked: No single major flaw drags the film down. Instead, a handful of smaller problems keep it from reaching its potential.
That’s a shame, because the premise is genuinely compelling. Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer whose career has stalled. Then an unusual offer changes everything: She’s hired to complete the final books in a celebrated series by Verity Crawford, a famous author who can no longer write them herself.
To do the job, Lowen moves into the Crawford home to sift through Verity’s notes. There, she meets Jeremy, Verity’s husband — a grieving man quietly holding his family together. As Lowen searches through the papers, she uncovers things she was never meant to find. Soon, she can’t tell what’s true, who’s lying, or how deep the secrets run. It’s exactly the kind of setup that should keep viewers glued to their seats.
The three leads bring real talent to the story. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen as soft-spoken and almost fragile, which makes sense for a woman stepping into someone else’s world. At times, though, the performance feels a little too timid. Lowen drifts through scenes when you want her to dig in, making it hard to feel the full weight of her fear or curiosity. Johnson has a quiet magnetism I genuinely love, and I wanted to see a bit more fire from her here.
Anne Hathaway, on the other hand, gives the role everything she has. Fully committed, she leaves a lasting impression even after she’s offscreen. Whenever the film needs a jolt of energy, Hathaway delivers.
Josh Hartnett rounds out the trio with a quietly convincing performance as Jeremy: warm, worn down, and full of unspoken pain. He keeps viewers wondering what’s happening beneath the surface and makes Jeremy feel like a person, not a puzzle piece.
The film loses its grip in the craft behind the camera. The editing feels choppy in places, cutting away just before the dread has a chance to settle in, then lingering elsewhere past a scene’s natural endpoint. A thriller lives and dies by its rhythm, and Verity stumbles more than once.
The direction also plays it a little too safe for material this dark and daring. Bolder visual choices could have made the Crawford home genuinely unsettling; instead, it mostly just feels dim. The pacing compounds the problem: The middle section drags, then the big moments rush in all at once, robbing the twists of their impact.
None of these issues is fatal on its own, but together they keep Verity from becoming the tense, gripping thriller it could have been. If you’re a fan of the book or the cast, it’s worth watching at home, as long as you keep your expectations in check.
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