Anne Hathaway's Verity is completely ridiculous – and exactly the film we need right now, according to a new review that celebrates its excess as seasonal comfort viewing.
The adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel stars Dakota Johnson as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to finish a bestselling book series by Verity Crawford (Hathaway), a famous author left incapacitated after a horrific accident. The job brings Lowen to the Crawfords' enormous, isolated home, where she digs through Verity's office and discovers an unpublished manuscript containing extremely disturbing revelations. There is also Verity's grieving husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), who is handsome, vulnerable, and conveniently down the hall.
A rollercoaster of excess
The review admits the film is heavy-handed, horny, and occasionally so detached from realism that some lines earned exasperated chuckles from the audience at the screening. But judging it for that, the critic argues, feels like criticising a rollercoaster for having too many drops – the excess is rather the point. Every room is drenched in unease, every lingering glance feels vaguely incriminating, and the film keeps tightening the screw until it reaches a bonkers, hard-to-believe final act. It is deeply atmospheric, genuinely tense, and mostly entertaining.
The review also makes a case for seasonal viewing: some of us take autumn extremely seriously, and certain media are seasonally dependent. A film that is objectively ridiculous in June can become Citizen Kane when watched under a blanket or in a cozy cinema in October. Verity offers grey skies, ominous woods, crackling fires, gorgeous wool coats, moral complexity, mysterious deaths, a sinister manuscript, and a cavernous house with fireplaces, bookshelves, throw blankets, steaming mugs of tea, and the ambience of generational wealth. Hartnett spends much of the film looking troubled in knitwear; Johnson wears a designer trench coat in the drizzle and looks pensive in a hot bath.
Performances that elevate the chaos
Johnson's charming deadpan works beautifully, giving Lowen a wryness that stops the story from disappearing up its own gothic backside. Hathaway plays Verity for much of the film like a storybook villain who has wandered into an erotic thriller, communicating in lingering stares, heightened menace, and a strange, slippery transatlantic accent delivered through immaculately painted red lips. It is a performance so enormous it could have its own billing – but every inch of that excess feels intentional. When the story requires Hathaway to abruptly strip all of that away, she does so beautifully, revealing how calculated the excess has been.
The biggest surprise is Hartnett. Jeremy could easily have been handsome plot furniture, but Hartnett gives what may be the most nuanced performance in the film. There is something unusually lived-in about him, particularly in quieter moments when Jeremy tries to keep grief, desire, anger, and suspicion from spilling out at once. He consistently chooses restraint in a film that has never met a dial it didn't want to turn up, making him strangely magnetic. Opposite Hathaway's theatricality and Johnson's cool detachment, he gives the story some much-needed emotional weight.
Not high art, but perfect for autumn
Is Verity a masterpiece? No. But masterpieces can be exhausting. Sometimes it is autumn and you want to spend the afternoon crunching through leaves with a chai latte, warm up with friends in a pub, then disappear into a dark cinema for something gripping, sexy, and – despite all the murder and psychological torment – strangely cozy. The nights are drawing in, the weather is miserable, and you have worn your best coat. Now you simply want to watch three extraordinarily attractive people make catastrophically poor decisions in a house with really amazing bathtubs. Verity may not be high art, but neither is a pumpkin spice latte, and the critic says they will be shamelessly enjoying both this autumn.
