Anne Hathaway has appeared in five movies this year. In her latest, she plays Verity Crawford, a glamorous, successful mystery novelist renowned for her ability to crawl inside the psyche of the nasty killers who are her central characters.
At the other end of the scale, young writer Lowen Ashleigh (played by Dakota Johnson) struggles to find an audience. She is quietly recruited to become Verity’s ghostwriter. The public doesn’t know that a nasty car crash has left Verity in a catatonic state, unable to speak or move. And that’s coming after Verity and her husband, Jeremy (played by Josh Hartnett), lost one of their twin toddlers to drowning.
Lowen is sequestered in the Crawfords’ luxurious, isolated New England lakeside cabin. It isn’t long before Lowen falls in love with Verity’s life and enters into an affair with her hunky, vulnerable husband—even while Verity is tucked away in a room nearby.
And as a further complication, Lowen uncovers a draft autobiography that shows Verity is a lot darker than anyone suspected. (The manuscript leads to flashbacks that give Hathaway a lot of her screen time.)
Director Michael Showalter began in comedy. (Anybody remember “Wet Hot American Summer”?) Here, working from Colleen Hoover’s novel, he’s got a somewhat familiar plot with three possibly deceptive characters and an audience wondering who to root for.
But he takes a sedate, interesting approach. The actors (especially Johnson) talk intently but quietly, as if they’re in a library. The only time blood is splattered on screen is from a random New York street accident in the movie’s first 10 minutes.
The result is a low-simmering tension that signals to the audience, “Hang on! Creepy secrets will eventually be revealed!”, aided by compelling performances from the three stars. (A side note: Hartnett is rather well-preserved, a whole 25 years after being the hot young leading man of “Pearl Harbor.”) The last act of the film shifts into high gear maybe a little too much, with revelations followed by twists and double twists. You may wonder if the film is ambiguously haunting, or just confused.
But, per the film’s title, the theme here does center on the idea of Truth.
Even with some significant missteps, “Verity” comes across as at least a Guilty Pleasure. I give it three-and-a-half goosebumps out of five.
