Verity Review: Anne Hathaway’s 2026 Winning Streak Had to End Sometime

Verity is a movie that makes a lot of noise about writing. The most important characters are authors. The MacGuffin pushing the plot into motion is a series of novels so compelling that its publisher is willing to pay a ghost writer half a million dollars to finish the lascivious twists and juicy turns; and the actual engine of it all is an unedited manuscript that comes with an author’s note all but entitled “How I Did It and Got Away Scott-Free.”

So dear reader, it becomes an open question how anyone reading the script by Nick Antosca, or presumably the source material novel by Colleen Hoover that I’ve never cracked open, could not second-guess the merit of the words passing as a narrative and allegedly scintillating dialogue. This is a movie where characters speak to each other like AI agents trying to fool a Turing Test after being trained exclusively on a diet of thirsty Lifetime movie fan fiction and late night Cinemax programming; a film where the titular novelist Verity Crawford speaks less like a Machiavellian femme fatale than a cross between Katharine Hepburn at her thickest Mid-Atlantic chic and Cruella de Vil. Anne Hathaway even seems to sprinkle in a little faux-Genovian Received Pronunciation for an extra flick of her affectation’s knife.

Admittedly, there is definitely something knowing at play in an adaptation of a smutty beach read featuring characters who claim they cringe at “airport books.” Verity is, after all, directed by adept comedy filmmaker Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, The Big Sick). Yet even if an entrepreneurial peddler of garbage winks at you while selling their wares, does that cleanse the trashy grime off your hands?

No, no it does not. But at least I think the film is aware of the pool of sleaze it invites you to cackle at while diving in. 

The descent starts early when in the opening seconds, central heroine Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) bears witness to a New York City accident that turns a bike messenger into street pizza, caking Johnson in the human marinara in the process. For some, this would be one of the worst moments in their life, but for Lowen and Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), it’s a meet-cute with that aforementioned uncanny trauma-bonding foreplay designed by a randy ChatGPT prompt. Jeremy is a real estate broker who helps Lowen get cleaned up and, serendipitously, will offer later that day this struggling-in-obscurity writer the chance to finish his wife’s beloved series of thriller novels all shockingly told from the villain’s perspective.

Apparently the great appeal of Verity Crawford’s works is they’re each framed to take the side of the bad guy, or more often bad gal (hmm). Alas, their mastermind has been catatonic due to some vague psychosomatic condition that occurred after a freak car accident where Verity ran her car into a tree. Look, the details are vague but the point is Mrs. Crawford is a vegetable, Jeremy promises, and her books’ money bags aren’t going to print themselves. So the about-to-be evicted Lowen has a golden opportunity she can’t refuse, especially since it comes with the chance to study bestselling Verity’s notes in her office from an idyllic Vermont lakehouse that appears like it was designed by Martha Stewart when she was going through a Voldemort phase.

It’s also there that Lowen meets Crew (Brady Wagner), Verity and Jeremy’s son, and the boy who lived. His twin sister wasn’t so lucky after what we’re told was another freak accident on. (Hmmm, a lot of that going around New England these days?!) There is also Verity herself, staring wide-eyed from her motionless wheelchair, plus an easy-to-find manuscript hidden in her computer. And wouldn’t you guess it? It’s her autobiography where Hathaway’s purring villainess will recount a lifetime of deceit, cunning, and murderous manipulation. Hmmmm!

A credited producer on the movie, Hathaway’s cartoonishly diabolical line readings, as well as the malevolent flips of her hair, are the main reason to indulge this silliness. More animalistic than her turn as Catwoman some years ago, she might as well be cooing when she licks her husband’s blood off her lips following a violent kiss in bed. Granted, her repeatedly announced villainy rarely transcends beyond the fervid imaginations of perverse Twilight slash fiction.

Nearly all of Hathaway’s scenes are told in flashback and narrated from, as she insists, the antagonist’s point-of-view. It’s curious, then, how little evil she actually commences in before third act revelations. Otherwise, both Verity and her film seem more distracted by the bite marks Verity leaves on a bedpost while banging her husband’s brains out than it is in anything outright evil. You’re, in fact, left to wonder more about the other scribbler who seems to spend less time outlining her book than she does longingly tracing her fingertips across the same bedpost, as if to ask when it will be her turn?

In what has undeniably been a big year for Hathaway, Verity seems to draw 2026 to a close with a campy turn so soapy, so bellicose that it likely appeals to an actor like a positively gaudy Halloween costume might to a sheltered Christian finally allowed to celebrate a little pagan hocus pocus. Johnson’s aloofness, meanwhile, is deployed solidly enough in th early scenes, particularly when she leans into her cool girl schtick while keeping Jeremy’s puppy-dog eyes at a distance. When the film requires Johnson to be vulnerable, or worse, empathetic toward Jeremy or the little boy in the house, her limitations come into sharper relief. On some level, we are asked to believe Johnson’s jejune innocence more than Hathaway’s scenery-chewing. Neither strike a natural chord, although the former is more of a problem for this kind of material.

Ultimately though, the material remains a light, wine mom blend despite promising passionate flavors and bold “darkness.” While I wouldn’t call Verity a happy story, my audience was more inclined to chortle than shudder at lines like, “I”m going to steal your husband” being whispered over the edge of a hospital bed. So I won’t say that the whole exercise leaves you feeling particularly good about anything you just watched, but you’ll definitely get more laughs than any outwardly self-styled comedy releasing in theaters this weekend.

Verity opens in theaters on Friday, Oct. 2.