On Screen: “Verity”
Verity
Inspired by Colleen Hoover’s 2018 bestseller, “Verity” is an erotic psychological thriller, propelled by the screen power of Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett and a stunning woodland house in Armonk, New York.
The convoluted story begins as struggling, insecure author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is summoned to Hachette Publishers in midtown Manhattan.
En route, a horrific car accident involving a bike messenger leaves Lowen blood-splattered. A hunky passerby helps her clean up in a nearby coffee shop restroom, giving her his white shirt so she can look presentable at the upcoming meeting.
Coincidentally, he turns out to be Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) whose wife, Verity (Anne Hathaway), is a best-selling novelist who can no longer write. An accident left her paralyzed — and the publisher is eager to pay Lowen a hefty fee to finish the next book in Verity’s popular series plus ghostwrite two more from the copious notes she left.
To retrieve Verity’s crime-writing files, Lowen moves into the Crawfords’ lavish lakeside Vermont house where likable Jeremy lives with his eight-year-old son Crew (Brady Wagner), whose twin sister drowned in a canoe accident a few months ago.
Immobile and catatonic, slyly sinister Verity is there too, tended by a portentous nurse (Irina Dvorovenko).
Predictably, Lowen and Jeremy find each other irresistibly attractive, but their incipient romance is somewhat thwarted when Lowen discovers autobiographical transcripts confessing the terrible things psychopathic Verity may or may not have done. What is fact vs. what is lurid fiction — and who really cares?
So what about that spectacular house? It’s known as Beckoning Path, a mid-century modern estate, designed by Denmark’s Jen Quistgard and built in 1955 by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé Edger Tatgel; it now serves as a wellness retreat center.
Adapted by Nick Antosca (“Cape Fear”) and directed by Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick”) with its predictable share of jump-scares, “Verity” is the latest of Colleen Hoover’s pulpy works to transfer to the silver screen, following “It Ends With Us,” “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him.”
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Verity” is a creepy, melodramatic yet stylish 6, playing in theaters.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.