published October 1, 2026
Verity the movie is every bit as catatonic as Verity the character.
Verity (the movie and the character) suffers from many problems, but the one that haunts both the most is the nagging feeling this storyline has been done better. And it was less than a year ago. It was The Housemaid, starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfreid.
Verity ’s based on the Colleen Hoover novel published in October 2021. Hoover adaptations have been sucking up so many resources and mind spaces. The End of Us, of course, made endless headlines over the real-life legal dust-up between its co-stars. But none of this should be confused with The Housemaid, Freida McFadden’s novel published in April 2022.
Nonetheless, confusing the tales of a maid and a ghostwriter is easy to do.
The story beats clock closely. As do the settings (the remote, lavish home with creepy hallways). And the characters (a psychotic woman, her child, an up-and-coming lovely young lady on the verge of eviction who becomes a houseguest, and a dude who – maybe not so enviously – gets stuck in the middle of the two women).
Sure, Verity and Housemaid each have a “special,” different narrative twist. But The Housemaid has the good sense to go for the naughty, lurid gusto.
In Verity, the thrills are dull and the atrocious romantic elements are garishly Harlequinian (you’re welcome). Bite the headboard, baby!
Instead of hiring a maid, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway, Love & Other Drugs) – renowned best-selling author – hires a ghostwriter. Well, her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett, Trap), does. Verity’s confined to a wheelchair following a car accident (she drove it into a tree, reportedly).
Enter Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, the Shades trilogy), a demure, off-the-radar author who happily disappears into the crowds on New York’s bustling sidewalks. (That bit of knowledge is passed on by way of an intermittent, as-is-convenient voiceover by Lowen.)
Casually walking along those sidewalks on her way to a job interview, Lowen out of nowhere is splattered in blood. It’s perhaps the movie’s sole effective scene: pigeons are shown dancing around in the gutter. All of a sudden there’s a crash. And blood.
Are the birds okay? They fled. But now a bicyclist is seen dead on the hood of a car.
As relatively effective as this scene is, it’s still not really much of a jump scare. Just a bizarre situation with the shock value coming from seeing Lowen’s face half-covered in crimson. It’s early, so there’s still hope it’s a bit of foreshadowing of darker scenarios and evils to come. But (hardly a spoiler) not so much.
Of course, it’s the device to get things rolling. Coming to her aid is an apparent gentleman, Jeremy. Short story shorter, he’s Verity’s wife and she needs a ghostwriter to cover for her while she’s wheelchair bound and in a catatonic state.
Verity is the author of supremely popular thrillers chock full o’ messed up characters with stories told from the point of view of the villain. Easily the most fun stems from scenes of Verity being interviewed by real-life media members: Gayle King (CBS News), Alex Cooper (Call Her Daddy podcast) and Sean Evans (Hot Ones series of interviews conducted over tastes of ever-increasingly hotter chicken wings). And for her part, Hathaway’s great as she juggles both the vivacious and beautiful media darling that is Verity Crawford, best-selling author, as well as the pale, immobile shadow of her celebrity self in the wake of her own personal tragedy.
Before the end credits roll, there’s one last interview clip with Verity that should send the audience out on a provocative, haunting note. Maybe even feel a little chill up and down the spine.
But. Nah.
So very little in this thrill-less thriller works. There’s no palpable tension in the environment, the story, the relationships. A sense of anxiety doesn’t build. There’s certainly precious little chemistry between Hathaway, Johnson and Hartnett. For that matter, even as standalone characters, there’s not much of a reason to care about any one of these people.
Not to point fingers, but a finger is pointed at Michael Showalter as the wrong guy to helm this project. Sure, he directed Hathaway previously in the age-gap crossing romance The Idea of You (co-starring Nicholas Galatzine), but Showalter’s comfort zone seems to be more on the off-kilter drama and comedic side of things. A highwater mark is The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which starred Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as televangelists Tammy and Jim Bakker.
Verity needed a tighter grip on every single aspect of the story and the characters, an approach that scrapes a thrill from every camera angle, every glance, every incident. It simply doesn’t happen here.
At the heart of Verity (both the movie and the character) is a silly twist involving an autobiography. It’s a manuscript, an unpublished work, but Lowen finds it in Verity’s files as she sifts through mounds of notes to patch together the framework for Verity’s anticipated next novels.
The goal is to complete Verity’s money-printing Noble Virtues series and Lowen has her work cut out for her as she absorbs all those notes and the atmosphere of the Crawfords’ creepy multi-A-framed house that sits off an idyllic lake.
That autobiography. Goodness. It’s awfully revealing and loaded with incriminating dirty secrets. In it, Verity asserts she killed her own daughter. But the police wrote it off as a tragic accident.
For Verity, so it would seem, the goal is to cast aside the heartwarming notions of living your best life. For her, it’s about living your worst possible life.
Be your worst self.
And profit off it.
As the U2 song The Fly goes, “Every artist is a cannibal. Every poet is a thief. All kill their inspiration then sing about their grief.”
As Lowen finds her own way through the next couple novels, she’s challenged by some nefarious possibilities. Or at least those possibilities desperately try to shake up the screen.
Is Verity a grieving mother or a guilty villainess?
Is Jeremy a victim? Or is he a puppeteer?
Who wrote the autobiography? Was it Verity? Could Jeremy have written it as a plant?
Entering the movie’s third act, there’s a sense the other stiletto is about to drop. When it finally does, though, it’s dropped on a (figurative) fluffed up down pillow.
There’s a major turning of the tables.
But there’s no impact.
There’s no sense of relishing the vicarious complicity.
But there are audible snickers when Lowen asserts, “We did the right thing. We’re good people.”