Lifeless on page and on screen
⭐1/2 Rating: 1.5 out of 4
The movie version of “Verity,” Colleen Hoover’s hackneyed page lift of Daphne du Maurier’s great 1938 Gothic psycho thriller “Rebecca,” has an all-star cast that may not be enough to give the romance novelist a fourth box office success.
Some of that is due to the source material. Where du Maurier understood and gave shape to corrupt and conflicted souls, Hoover’s works play like soulless connect-the-dots exercises, and come off that way on screen. The script by Nick Antosca is unfortunately too loyal to Hoover’s novel, and director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick” and “The Idea of You”) is merely a serviceable filmmaker with a knack for small, cloistered melodrama. (In contrast, du Maurier’s was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, and won the Oscar for Best Picture.)
The cast, though, is an impressive assemblage, led by Anne Hathaway as the titular Verity Crawford, a wildly successful author who pens dark psychological thrillers by, for and about women (art imitating life?). It’s her fifth movie this year, and this is the one she’d probably hope people forget. Josh Hartnett plays her hunky husband and Dakota Johnson, who unfortunately regresses from her breakout in “The Lost Daughter” (2021) to her cinematic roots in the kinky sex nonsense “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015).
Johnson’s Lowen Ashleigh is, like Verity, an author, but more literary. She’s also struggling financially; we meet her at a small independent bookstore in Manhattan reading to an audience of three. Later, as she’s packing up the apartment she’s being evicted from, her agent (Ismael Cruz Cordova) tells her of a big opportunity at publisher Hachette. Lowen dresses up and heads to the meeting, only to be spattered by blood when a cyclist is struck by a streaking car just feet away. Before she can even react, a chivalrous stranger (Hartnett) swoops in to literally give her the shirt off his back so she can go to her meeting. And after Lowen signs the NDA so she can learn about the offer, in walks Hartnett’s Jeremy, to tell her his wife, the famous author Verity, just had a car accident, is paralyzed and can’t speak. So Hachette wants to pay Lowen some good buck to ghost write Verity’s series.
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