a.k.a. “Someone read the CliffNotes for Gone Girl”

Director: Michael Showalter
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Brady Wagner
Screenplay: Nick Antosca
114 mins. Rated R for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images.

Colleen Hoover’s novels have become a fireworks display of possible film adaptations for the past few years, most of them falling into the more traditional romance angle, but Verity reteams actress Anne Hathaway (Interstellar) with her The Idea of You director Michael Showalter for a dark and sexy thriller that gets lost in every narrative wrinkle, making little sense and straining credulity to the breaking point.

Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, The Social Network) is a writer of a respected but unread novel under her belt, but she’s been recruited by the husband of celebrated author Verity Crawford (Hathaway) to finish her Noble Virtues series. Verity survived a car wreck following the death of her daughter and now lives bedridden, unable to speak or write or do much of anything. Lowen stays in Verity’s home and has access to years of notes as she begins the writing process, but when she finds Verity’s manuscript for an autobiography, she starts to uncover sinister truths about the bestselling author.

From the few film adaptations I’ve seen of Hoover’s work, there’s a very distinct voice to the dialogue that I’ve found to be rather grating. I’m not critiquing the writing of her books because I simply haven’t read them, and maybe in those novels, the writing works for the style. In adaptation, however, there some simply ludicrous bits of dialogue here, and I feel terrible that Dakota Johnson’s been subjected to, yet again, a bad screenplay. It becomes difficult to even judge Johnson’s work when she’s handed the Fifty Shades trilogy and films like Madame Web to work with. Screenwriter Nick Antosca has a very distinct writing style as well, but the works he’s contributed to are more heightened and unreal. This movie is just taken far too seriously for the slapdash and silly writing.

I’m a fan of Hot People Doing Bad Things, but the cast is really struggling here. They’re all hot, but there’s something in all that heat that is missing in the sex appeal. Verity frequently finds itself trying the erotic thriller angle but it’s missing that key ingredient. There’s chemistry, but there’s no buildup to it, no foreplay, just several sequences that feel like an AI chatbot that’s never had sex trying to explain sex.

It’s a difficult hurdle when adapting a novel like Verity which boils down to casting. By putting an A-List celebrity in the title role, there’s an expectation placed on it, a narrative twist that feels more telegraphed than it should. Anne Hathaway just has so little to do here for most of the film outside of a few flashbacks here and there, but it feels so obvious where things are headed. The movie also has a final scene that isn’t a half-bad idea but the narrative leaps for these characters turns leave far more questions than satisfying answers. Sure, if I read the novel, maybe those gaps would fill in, but an adaptation should never required additional reading.

Damn, I really wanted to like Verity, but this is such a silly movie and no single element really works at all. The mysteries feel solved by the end of the first act, and the twists and turns don’t do much to dissuade or develop the mysteries any further. It’s not smart enough to maintain the thrills and it isn’t sexy enough to become fully erotic. It’s funny, but unintentionally so. At the very least, the movie looks good (for the most part). While Verity may satisfy fans of the novel, I was ultimately let down by a screenplay that doesn’t adapt the material for film and direction that feels asleep at the wheel.

2/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For more Michael Showalter: The Big Sick