Verity

Colleen Hoover is Gen Z’s Nicholas Sparks. This marks the fourth (and counting) movie adaptation of her 25 (and counting) romance novels, following $350 million smash It Ends With Us and its associated Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni spin-off legal drama. And while damp squib effort Reminders of Him (out earlier this year) left viewers shortchanged on both plot and proper steaminess, rest assured both are fully present and erect in erotic psychothriller Verity.

Dakota Johnson slips pleasurably back into Fifty Shades of Grey mode as Lowen Ashleigh. A penniless writer – she’s presumably blown the rent on all that skimpy designer lingerie – Lowen is offered a financial lifeline when she’s paid big bucks to secretly ghost write the next instalments in a bestselling series. Clearly the publisher hasn’t heard of a little thing called A.I….

Its author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), has been incapacitated by a mysterious accident. So it’s Verity’s hot, rich husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) who invites Lowen to stay at their remote glass-box mansion in snowy Vermont, where Verity lies mute, immobile and apparently catatonic. Or is she?

Lowen is given free rein over Verity’s notes and papers and discovers a dark secret lurking there: a horrific autobiographical confession which casts a deeply disturbing light on what may really be going on chez Crawford.   

Showalter and his cast clearly had a right giggle making this

Based on Hoover’s self-published 2018 sensation, Verity is considered one of her darkest and most divisive novels. It’s also extremely silly. The gothic DNA is obvious: Jane Eyre, Rebecca… a remote mansion, a dashing and dangerous husband, a potentially mad woman upstairs. But it’s this year’s Amanda Seyfried hit The Housemaid that springs most immediately to mind.

Verity is unlikely to be a similar $400 million+ runaway smash. It has at least one logic-exploding twist too many and a lengthy ‘reveal’ that overstays welcome. But it’s mostly a wild and fun ride.

Director Michael Showalter tellingly made a splash with cult comedy Wet Hot American Summer before directing Oscar contenders like The Big Sick and The Eyes of Tammy Faye and he plays Verity’s somewhat deranged tone just right. 

The story’s subject matter may be darker than dark: only Colleen Hoover could have a romantic meet-cute in which a guy turns on a girl by telling her: ‘I picked my 8-year-old daughter’s body out of a lake last spring’. However, Showalter and his cast clearly had a right giggle making this – and, for the most part, you will too.

In cinemas worldwide Fri Oct 2.