Verity review: Colleen Hoover adaptation promises pulp, yet never fully satisfies

At the end of 2025, BookTok diehards were gifted one deadly fun book-to-screen adaptation in the form of The Housemaid, a semi-erotic psychological thriller starring two of Hollywood’s most famous blondes as two women who find themselves caught up in a love triangle, with some seriously disturbing secrets lying beneath the surface.

In many ways, Michael Showalter’s take on Verity plays out like The Housemaid’s darker sister – and not just in its leads’ hair colours.

Based on Colleen Hoover’s book of the same name, we follow struggling young author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson). She’s just lost her mother to cancer, split up with her boyfriend, and is on the verge of being evicted from her apartment. On the way to a meeting, Lowen witnesses a man get hit by a car.

Enter Josh Hartnett’s mysterious stranger Jeremy, who offers to help Lowen out – giving her a paper towel and the perfectly white shirt off his back, all while claiming that he’s “seen worse” before. A one-of-a-kind meet-cute, that’s for sure.

As it turns out, Jeremy is actually the husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who has been rendered unable to finish her series of popular thriller novels for some unspecified reason. What Verity’s agents want from Lowen is for her to ghostwrite the rest of Verity’s novels and, due to her aforementioned recent hardships – and the fact she’s more than a bit attracted to Jeremy – Lowen agrees.

Some time later, she’s driving to the Crawford estate in snowy, and conveniently remote, Vermont, where she quickly discovers that Verity is in a much worse condition than Jeremy had initially let on. Several months prior, Verity had suffered a devastating car crash that left her unable to walk or talk.

Instead of working directly with the bestseller, Lowen will now have to sift through Verity’s disorganised notes to decipher how best to end her novels. But as Lowen and Jeremy start getting closer and Verity’s autobiography notes get increasingly concerning, it seems that completing the book series might be the least of her problems.

Parts of Verity will have you wondering whether its intention is to resurrect the ’80s and ’90s erotic thrillers – your Basic Instincts or your Fatal Attractions, for example. And in many ways, that’s exactly what the film achieves: what with its vintage, typographic opening title, headboard-biting sex scenes, candy-apple blood splatters and sudden, almost inappropriately positioned, jump scares.

Such inclusions work fairly well, and are certainly enough to keep you guessing. Yet you can’t help but wonder if Verity would have been more effective if it had just pushed that little bit further into this genre – if it had indulged further into its campy, melodramatic, psychosexual tension instead of abandoning much of its pulp on the surface.

Even so, Verity catapults itself far further in front of Hoover’s other adaptations thus far. As the fourth of Hoover’s novels to be converted to the big screen, Showalter and screenwriter Nick Antosca have well-preserved the addictive, trashy qualities of its airport-read source material with just a handful of blips along the way: the absence of Verity and Jeremy’s second twin daughter Chastin, for example, and some hyperbolic 2026 modernisations that begin with chain-vaping and Call Her Daddy, and end with an appearance on Hot Ones. Meanwhile, Jim Frohna also nourishes the film’s atmosphere with some wonderfully moody cinematography.

All three of Verity’s leads stand on stable legs, though Hathaway’s titular Verity is undoubtedly the film’s standout. Despite this being her fifth film of the year, the Les Mis superstar hasn’t let an inch of her star power become diluted, and while mostly appearing in densely narrated flashbacks when she’s not bed bound, it’s obvious that she’s having immense amounts of fun with the role.

Meanwhile, Johnson infuses Lowen with some of her regular leather jacket-donning cool girl energy, working in more than a few one-liners that, whether intentionally or not, leave quite the comedic impression – her delivery of “That sounds very irresistible,” stands out as a particular memorable example.

There isn’t a huge amount of substance under the surface of Verity – though such shortcomings lie more with its source material than its adaptation, because really, it’s probably time to give the Colleen Hoover adaptations a rest. But with a morally ambiguous, decently gasp-worthy ending that most casual viewers won’t see coming, Verity’s end result is some two hours of deliciously silly, medium-seasoned meat that you can sink your teeth into. Maybe it’ll even draw blood.

Verity is now showing in UK cinemas.

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