“I don’t read books you can buy in an airport,” snipes Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), an author whose readings are so poorly attended that you know she would kill to have a display in Hudson News. So it’s with warring disdain and envy that she watches the best-selling writer Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) bask in a gushing television interview with Gayle King.
Lowen has been hired to ghostwrite three novels that Verity, now reportedly paralyzed and unable to speak, has left unfinished. The job comes with a hefty fee and access to Verity’s hunky husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), who is attractively grieving his drowned daughter. So when Lowen moves into the couple’s luxury lakeside home and discovers what appears to be Verity’s shockingly confessional autobiography, her services to the household soon expand beyond writing. There’s nothing like murder — or learning that your literary rival might be a bona fide psychopath — to fire up the libido.
“Verity,” directed by Michael Showalter and based on Colleen Hoover’s self-published 2018 novel, is selling itself as a psychological thriller, but it’s much more convincing as a comedy. The movie’s attempts to shock are genuinely hilarious, in part because of Nick Antosca’s preposterously perforated screenplay, and dialogue so shamelessly pulpy (“I was his drug, and he was mine”) it would have made Jacqueline Susann cringe. Most giggle-worthy of all are the otherwise bland sex scenes in which both women, at different times, become so inflamed by Jeremy’s ministrations that they’re forced to gnaw on a wooden headboard. (Presumably, it was sanitized between chewings.) Although considering the film’s fondness for bitten and bleeding lips, they could just be sharpening their teeth.
Blood on the face is a recurring motif, most obviously when Lowen and Jeremy meet cute over an explosion of gore from a traffic accident. Even more perturbing is a scene in which Jeremy’s young son puts a kitchen knife in his mouth and Lowen, watching, does nothing to stop him. No one behaves credibly here, and everything is questionable. Did we just see Verity walk? Is Lowen hallucinating? Are both women insane?
Employing more soap than laundry day on an oil rig, “Verity” regurgitates scraps of multiple female-centric thrillers — especially Barbet Schroeder’s “Single White Female” (1992) — trapping all three principals in a plot so bonkers it simply runs out of road, leaving us with no satisfying resolution. How actors of this caliber were roped in remains a mystery, though the fact that Hathaway and Johnson look so alike is certainly thematically convenient. Of the two, Johnson has the easier task, purely by dint of being mostly upright, while Hathaway spends much of the movie emoting while horizontal. As for Hartnett, this is pretty much a dream job: He was born to play good guys with a side order of villain.
Glossed-up by Jim Frohna’s wintry images, “Verity” is serving knockoff Brian De Palma without understanding that, when it comes to trash, the line between simple-minded and sublime can be exceedingly fine. The movie’s most insurmountable problem, though, may be Lowen herself, who is so lacking a personality she confesses to Jeremy that she was once described as having “resting bored face.” By the end of “Verity,” the same could have been said about me.
Verity Rated R for one fondled breast, two watery deaths and three extravagantly screwed-up housemates. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.
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