WARNING: This piece contains major spoilers for Verity, in both its book and film form, and discusses themes including child death and family violence.
There is no light where we’re going. Darkness ahead.
Colleen Hoover’s 2018 thriller Verity has been one of my favourite guilty-pleasure reads for years, so when the film adaptation finally landed in cinemas, I had to see it.
Directed by Michael Showalter (The Idea of You), Verity stars Anne Hathaway as the title’s bestselling author, Dakota Johnson as struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh, and Josh Hartnett as Verity’s husband, Jeremy Crawford. It is a tight, handsome adaptation, and it is remarkably faithful to the book. That faithfulness, it turns out, is also the problem.
On the page, the central mystery, is this bestselling author a monster or a victim, carries you past just how wild the plot actually gets. Watching it play out in full colour, with real actors saying the lines out loud, I found the twists landing less like shocks and more like punchlines. It all felt very… TV Movie of the Week. It is still creepy in places. It is also, somehow, never not a little bit funny.
That is not necessarily a criticism. Verity was always soap opera dressed up as literary suspense, and this adaptation leans into the camp rather than fighting it. Hathaway, barely able to move for most of the runtime, has to do a lot of her acting with her face alone, and she is genuinely unsettling in the role. Johnson has the harder job, playing a woman who keeps making worse and worse decisions, and mostly sells it. Go in treating it as the fun, slightly deranged thriller it is, rather than a prestige drama, and you will have a blast.
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The synopsis
For anyone who has not read the book: Lowen Ashleigh is a broke novelist who witnesses a man killed in a New York hit-and-run, and is helped, by chance, by a stranger named Jeremy Crawford. It turns out Jeremy’s wife is Verity Crawford, the hugely successful author of a bestselling thriller series. Verity has been left unable to move or speak since a car accident, and her publisher needs someone to finish her unfinished manuscripts. Lowen gets the job, and moves into the remote Crawford family home in Vermont.
While going through Verity’s office, Lowen finds a hidden manuscript titled So Be It, Verity’s secret autobiography. In it, Verity confesses to resenting her own children as rivals for Jeremy’s attention, including an attempt on her infant daughter Harper’s life. There is also an extended, deeply disturbing subplot from early in Verity’s first pregnancy that does not make the film at all.
As Lowen keeps reading (and grows closer to Jeremy), the manuscript reveals that the couple’s eldest daughter, Chastin, died of a severe allergic reaction as a child, and that Verity became convinced her surviving twin, Harper, was somehow responsible. Months later, Harper drowned in what Verity’s own writing reveals was no accident. The book heavily implies that Verity’s own crash, the one that supposedly left her catatonic, happened only after Jeremy worked out what she had done.
True to Hoover form, the ending refuses to give a clean answer. A letter from Verity, discovered afterwards, claims the whole “confession” was a writing exercise, and that Jeremy is the dangerous one. Lowen rips it up without telling him. Nobody, reader included, ever really finds out the truth.
What the movie changes
Fewer kids. The film cuts Chastin entirely, keeping only Harper and Crew as Verity and Jeremy’s children. It simplifies a huge chunk of the book’s backstory, but makes sense given how much of a production a third child actor would have added.
The miscarriage subplot is gone. That extended, grim sequence from early in Verity’s first pregnancy does not appear on screen at all. The film keeps only the attempt on baby Harper’s life.
Lowen’s sleepwalking is barely there. In the book, Lowen’s history of dangerous sleepwalking is a huge part of her character and the suspense. Dakota Johnson has said on record that she did not think watching someone sleepwalk made for compelling viewing, so most of it was cut or left on the editing room floor.
The birthday dinner changes. In the book, Lowen’s birthday is a low-key family dinner that includes Jeremy’s son, Crew. The film turns it into a romantic two-hander between Lowen and Jeremy alone.
Lowen’s pen name is cut. In the book, Lowen takes on the pseudonym Laura Chase to distance herself from Verity’s famous series. The film skips this entirely and keeps her as Lowen throughout.
Verity’s hair colour changed. She is blonde on the page; Hathaway kept her own brunette hair for the role.
Verity becomes a much bigger celebrity. The film invents a whole press circuit for Verity that does not exist in the book, including cameos from Gayle King, “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper and “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans, all playing themselves. Hathaway has said the idea was hers, pitched in a production meeting as a “triple crown trifecta” to sell Verity as a cultural icon.
If you loved the book, Verity is worth seeing, if only to find out how much stranger it feels once you can actually watch the mayhem play out. I think the film does a better job with the ambiguity around what really happened. Based on book alone, I was #TeamManuscript but the film does a better job of making me ponder #TeamLetter.
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