Verity Review: There Is No Light or Much Sense, It Turns Out

I walked out of Verity thinking it was alright. Nothing about it blew me away, but it held my attention, gave me a few things to chew on afterward, and gets considerably more twisted as it moves along. Based on Colleen Hoover’s novel, the movie follows struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh, played by Dakota Johnson, who gets hired to finish a successful book series after its author, Verity Crawford, is unable to continue writing.

Johnson is absolutely the weakest part of the movie for me. I’ve always found her acting stiff, and that doesn’t change here. Lowen spends a lot of the movie trying to figure out what’s happening around her, which should give Johnson plenty to play with, but too much of it comes across flat when the movie needs a little more from her.

Josh Hartnett fares much better as Verity’s husband, Jeremy. He’s very good here and brings enough to the character that you’re never completely comfortable deciding what to make of him. Hartnett has been on a pretty great run lately, and this is another role that reminds you how good he can be when he gets something worthwhile to work with.

The real surprise for me was Anne Hathaway. I’m used to seeing her in plenty of different kinds of movies, but I can’t remember seeing her play quite this shade of deranged before. There’s something off about Verity almost immediately, and Hathaway keeps shifting the temperature of the character enough that you’re never completely sure what you’re looking at. It’s easily the most interesting performance in the movie.

Michael Showalter also deserves some credit. I still remember him from The State, so seeing him directing what might be his most mainstream movie yet is a pretty wild career progression. More importantly, he handles the pacing well. Verity runs just under two hours, and I never really felt it dragging, which is exactly what you want in a movie built around slowly revealing information and making you question what you’ve already seen.

The story itself is decent enough, and for most of the movie I was willing to go wherever it wanted to take me. It keeps feeding you just enough information to change how you look at the characters without stopping every ten minutes to explain itself. That restraint works in its favor, especially when the movie starts getting darker and it does go pitch black. Then you get to the ending.

I’m staying completely away from spoilers because this is definitely a movie where knowing too much beforehand would ruin a good portion of the fun. I’ll just say the ending is seriously messed up. It leaves enough unanswered that I walked out still turning things over in my head and trying to decide exactly who knew what, when they knew it, and what was actually true.

That’s also where Verity starts getting itself into trouble. The more I worked backward through what happened, the more some of the logic started to come tumbling down. Certain decisions that work enough while you’re caught up in the movie make a lot less sense once you start pulling them apart afterward. I don’t need every thriller wrapped up with a bow, but if you’re going to leave me questions, I’d like those questions to come from the mystery and not from wondering why the characters did something in the first place.

That makes Verity what I’d call a whozitwhatzit. You leave with a bunch of questions, some theories, and probably a different interpretation from the person sitting next to you. I just wish a few of those questions had better answers once I started thinking about them.

Still, I had a decent time with it. Hathaway gets to be wonderfully strange, Hartnett is strong, Showalter keeps the movie moving, and the story held my attention all the way through. Verity works better while you’re watching it than it does when you start taking the ending apart, but for nearly two hours, it kept me interested.