Verity Review – Love True Lies and Terribly Twisted Fiction

When the truth gets lost in Lies and Manipulation – Verity Review

Fiction writers have the unique ability to create worlds with their words that stay in the psyche long after the content has been consumed. Much like the best liars, great fiction writers manage to present characters and scenarios that can blur the lines between fantasy and reality by incorporating elements from their own lives and experiences, leaving us wondering what’s real and what isn’t.

This is where we find ourselves with the psychological thriller Verity. Based on Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, it’s directed by Michael Showalter and stars Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett

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Anne Hathaway plays the titular character Verity Crawford, a popular bestselling author with a hit book series. She appears to have the perfect life with her charming, valiant husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and her adorable son Crew. Following a terrible car accident,  Verity is seriously injured and left near-paralysed, unable to move independently or communicate. Her publishers, eager not to suffer any financial loss by not releasing the next book on time, recruit a ghostwriter, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), to get into Verity’s mind and write the next book in the series.

Verity has a uniquely dark voice and style of writing, with her stories always told from the villain’s point of view, often with shocking and always violent subject matter and outcomes. But there is no morality to those stories, as the villain is the main character; they tend to succeed in their goal, no matter how sinister. This unusual approach captured the imagination of readers worldwide, contributing to a very loyal fanbase.

So it’s decided that the best way for Lowen to capture and recreate Verity’s ‘voice’ without her fans noticing her absence is for Lowen to move into Verity’s home, live as part of the family, work in her office, and explore her notes and private spaces, which leads not only to the discovery of her inspirations but also some very dark secrets.

In the true tradition of psychological thrillers, there is an air of tension and palpable sense of unease right from the outset. When Lowen moves in, it’s fairly obvious that members of this unplanned trouple would at some point end up in naughty bedroom shenanigans. The sex scenes are passionate and erotic but quite tame by today’s standards. Some aspects of the film reminded me of Sydney Sweenys hit thriller from last year, ‘The Housemaid’, but unlike that film, this takes a slower, more subtle approach, slightly more understated to build more tension ahead of its big reveal and inevitable end-of-movie twist

Verity has solid performances from all three leads; cinematography is not what I would describe as bold but feels very confident, with wider shots and beautiful daytime landscapes contrasted with darker, shadowy sections that at times almost edge toward a horror/supernatural theme. Verity’s voice is used as a narrator at times, and numerous flashbacks allow information to be drip-fed to us at relevant moments to push the story forward when necessary. The author’s own voice as narrator also helped sell the version of events being presented to the audience.

The film moves at a reasonable pace, and at under 2hours, doesn’t overstay its welcome. The conclusion is actually interesting, but the obligatory twist may have lacked some impact, as rather than provide exposition and resolution, it merely presented another version of events, leaving things open for the audience to decide what the truth was, much like the spinning top at the end of ‘Inception’, but nowhere near as intriguing

Verity is a solid, enjoyable but mostly predictable thriller with decent performances and a conclusion which calls into question how simply truth and reality can be manipulated, and how easily we sometimes accept those versions of events, especially if it’s a narrative that suits our own desires.

In cinemas now