Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “Verity.”
“Verity” is hard to measure by a single standard. The psychological thriller, which opened in theaters Oct. 2, earned an estimated $32.6 million in its opening weekend, joining a string of box-office hits adapted from Colleen Hoover’s novels. Hoover, a best-selling author, also wrote the novel behind the controversial film “It Ends With Us.” Critics and readers alike have long questioned the literary merit of her work, and her rise as a TikTok sensation has drawn as much skepticism as attention. “Verity” was in the spotlight before its release, anticipated by enthusiastic fans and curious skeptics alike. While that may have guaranteed a box-office success, what it could not guarantee was a good film.
The film opens with a series of coincidences, the kind one would expect from a “Fifty Shades” movie, which just so happens to also star “Verity” actress Dakota Johnson. Lowen (Johnson), a young writer whose talent has gone undiscovered, meets with a publishing company and Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), the husband of best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway). A car accident has left Verity unable to continue with her book, and Lowen is offered $500,000 to ghostwrite three novels for her series. To get up to speed with Verity’s progress, Lowen must also move into the couple’s home in Vermont and go through the notes in Verity’s office. Troubled by the mysterious death of Verity’s daughter but swayed by the money, Lowen eventually agrees to the terms and moves in with Jeremy and his timid son, Crew.
After the shock of seeing how severely paralyzed Verity is, Lowen quickly finds the hard drive Verity supposedly kept hidden, a discovery that feels a little too convenient. On it is a manuscript in which Verity confesses the dark side of her past.
The following sequences play out exactly as one would expect. In the most clichéd way possible, Verity narrates her life like an audiobook: how she first fell in love, became overwhelmed by her pregnancy, grew tired of her children and drowned her daughter in the lake behind the house, staging it as an accident. Reading Verity’s twisted manuscript, Lowen grows sympathetic toward Jeremy and, with little logic, almost immediately falls in love with him. She hopes to replace Verity, even as she is haunted by Verity’s presence. Gradually, Lowen starts to suspect that Verity has been faking her paralysis, and a casual remark from Crew seems to confirm her theory.
Not much of the later plot makes sense, but eventually Jeremy confronts Verity after learning the truth about her condition from Lowen. A fight breaks out, and at Lowen’s suggestion, they stage Verity’s death as an accident. Only after Lowen and Jeremy dump Verity’s body into the same lake, where she supposedly drowned her daughter, does Lowen find a letter from Verity that contradicts the manuscript. In it, Verity states that the manuscript was only a writing exercise; however, things spiraled out of control when her husband accidentally discovered it. Believing every word of that manuscript, Jeremy then staged the car accident in revenge, and she faked her condition while waiting to escape with Crew. Lowen, now pregnant with Jeremy’s child, is left in shock and the film closes on a genuinely provocative ambiguity.
If this highly condensed synopsis makes the plot sound somehow interesting, little of that excitement is part of the actual viewing experience. Hathaway’s acting is fragmented, swinging between an irrational lover, a depressed mother and a cold-blooded psychopath. Her performance shows little transition between them, and she ends up playing three characters rather than three sides of the same one. Unlike Hathaway, who occasionally has compelling moments, Johnson gives a performance that is simply empty. Lowen looks exactly the same whether she is shocked, afraid or happy. The director Michael Showalter seems well aware of this problem, as the film leans on endless voice-over to advance the plot whenever possible. Although voice-over is a common technique in literary adaptations, here it acts like a cover-up, simply explaining what the performance cannot convey.
Still, acting is not the root of the problem for “Verity.” At its very core, the film is extremely superficial and highly materialistic. Soul, or personality, seems almost nonexistent among the major characters. Lowen is less an aspiring writer than a desperate young woman living out a twisted Cinderella story. Her profession also plays little part in this fantasy: Make her a babysitter instead of a writer, and the plot would barely need to change. When the film does engage with writing, it portrays female writers as irrational, unable to separate themselves from their work. This kind of portrayal is especially disappointing given that Hoover herself is a successful female writer.
From there, the conversation around the film slides almost inevitably into misogyny. On TikTok, feverish fans have split into two camps: Team Manuscript, who believe Verity did everything she wrote, and Team Letter, who believe that she is innocent. Either way, the debate puts Verity, a woman and a mother of two children, on trial while ignoring the irresponsibility of her husband, which is evident throughout the film. Jeremy is shown first as an attractive lover and later as a traumatized father. But in between, the irresponsible husband is largely erased from the narrative. During Verity’s emotionally fraught pregnancy, she is portrayed as a helpless single mother, even though her husband is there all along. This problematic portrayal of Verity continues the long-standing double standard in domestic life, in which nothing is expected of the husband and everything of the wife. If she falls short, best-selling author or not, she becomes the madwoman in the attic.
In the film, when asked whether she has read any of Verity’s novels, Lowen answers, “I don’t read books you can buy at an airport,” afraid that she would judge them afterward. And that sums up my viewing experience. Unfortunately, this airport book made it to the silver screen.
Peter Zhao is an Arts & Entertainment Intern for the fall 2026 quarter. He can be reached at peterhz@uci.edu.
Edited by Avani Kumar and Tracy Sandoval.
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