Los Angeles, CA – You know how it is with adaptations. You are invited into a world without the stray pleasures of imagination as someone else reads between the lines for you. That way, the twisted dynamics of Colleen Hoover’s novel Verity seem to be forever at odds with the audio-visual sense of director Michael Showalter in the adaptation. While telling a story rooted in the idea of truth and its manipulation, Michael leads with a sensationalist reckoning, leaving little space for nuance as he infuses flashy visuals, jump-scary edit patterns, and a nosy, The Shining meets Final Destination-type background score.
The action point towards violence begins when a struggling writer, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), sees an accident happen in front of her and blood splatter all over her body. On her way to a meeting with a big publisher, Lowen has no choice but to accept help from a stranger, Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), who offers his white shirt to her. A sense of superficiality starts crippling early on as Lowen comes to know Jeremy as the husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who wants Lowen to complete her upcoming book after a car accident leaves her comatose. It’s here that Lowen comes across an autobiographical piece that Verity had started writing, which reveals darker secrets about her obsessive relationship with Jeremy and her hate towards their twin kids.
Taking on the material from Hoover, Nick Antosca’s screenplay is devoid of subtexts. The psychological density of the story is presented with a direct outcome in scenes that only focus on the action of events while forgetting to shape the inner lives of characters and their relationships. The film seems to be stuck in the minds of Lowen and Verity, with voiceovers dryly explaining major plot points. Forget a dark, twisted, erotic drama; what’s hiding beneath Verity is an unrealised parody. Its characters belong to a movie and not in real life, and their only tragedy is in not being even minutely self-aware. The seriousness feels compulsive even in the intimate scenes, which play over with a caged physicality whose only motivation is to justify its genre.
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I wouldn’t have imagined a review turning shamefully to puns to describe a Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway starrer that was promoted widely for the sizzling chemistry between the two. Having watched the film, I now understand the real reason for that scene. It serves purely as an object of male desire, having little significance in the narrative. Anne feels surprisingly lost in the film, never quite getting to her enigmatic groove, while Dakota struggles to evoke a sense of tension and vulnerability. Not that Hartnett guarantees a defining screen presence either. A film that is going down destroys everything that it touches. What is shown is not implied, and what is implied is not shown. Verity will be released in theatres on October 2.
