Verity means truth. But in the new movie Verity, what’s true and what’s not true is not always easy to discern.
Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is a successful novelist. She suffers a debilitating injury. Her husband Jeremy (Josh Harnett) recruits writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) to take Verity’s notes and outlines and write the novels that Verity had planned. He tells Lowen that Verity was a fan of Lowen’s work.
Jeremy even invites Lowen to move into the family’s home deep in the woods of Vermont to use Verity’s office and to bunk in the master bedroom. Verity is in another part of the house in a hospital bed with a nurse nearby. Verity does not speak and while she IS alive she appears to be catatonic.
As Lowen gets to work, she finds a thumb drive that has Verity’s autobiography, written sometime before her disability. She is stunned by what she reads. An added layer to the story: Verity and Jeremy’s young daughter was killed in a boating accident. Their young son survived.
Will there be sparks between Jeremy and this younger woman who, like his wife, is beautiful and has long black hair? And will this younger woman manage to suppress her thoughts about this handsome young husband who is always in close proximity? And what about the suspicion Lowen has that Verity is possibly not as completely out of it as she seems?
The mysterious happenings in the story and the relationships between the characters develop a bit clumsily in the film. Verity is adapted from a book by the prolific Coleen Hoover. One assumes that those developments play out more smoothly on the printed page.
Hoover is a pop novelist whose sales figures are beyond impressive. At one point in the movie, a disparaging remark is made about “books that are sold in airport bookstores.” Presumably that’s a joke as Hoover likely records huge sales to folks who want something to occupy their minds on a long flight.
It’s not a spoiler to mention that things are not always what they appear to be in Verity. The long and winding road leading up to the house in the woods could be judged to be symbolic of the directions the narrative takes. Or maybe not. Verity is rated R for some sexual content and a bit of nudity.
