Verity Review: Anne Hathaway Anchors Colleen Hoover's Adaptation With Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett
I went into Verity fully aware of the fandom it’s walking into, Colleen Hoover’s novel has one of the most devoted readerships in contemporary thriller fiction, and expectations for this adaptation were always going to be sky-high. Having now sat through the film, I can say it gets there eventually. The problem is just how long “eventually” takes. Starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, the film arrives via Amazon MGM Studios on October 2, 2026, carrying the weight of a massive built-in readership eager to see Hoover’s twisted domestic thriller brought to life.
VerityLet’s start with the obvious issue: the first half is a slog. Director Michael Showalter and writer Nick Antosca spend an enormous amount of time setting up the world of Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) and the Crawford household, and for most of it, I genuinely struggled to figure out where the story was actually going. Scenes stack up without much narrative urgency, and by the thirty-minute mark, I found myself checking how much runtime was left rather than leaning into the mystery. For a psychological thriller, that’s not a great sign, this genre lives and dies by its ability to keep you unsettled and curious from the jump, and Verity
Once the plot does pick up speed, it leans into a storyline that’s frankly not hard to see coming, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is not the harmless, comatose figure she initially appears to be, and yes, that’s the “crazy wife” twist most genre-savvy viewers will guess almost instantly. What bothered me more, though, was how predictably Dakota Johnson’s character behaves once she’s alone in this house with Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett). Every beat of her slow slide into an affair with a married man, whose wife is conveniently unconscious down the hall, plays out exactly the way you’d expect from this kind of domestic thriller. There’s no real subversion here, just a fairly by-the-numbers descent that the film seems content to let unfold on autopilot.
My biggest gripe, though, is how cluttered the back half gets. Between the fabricated manuscript, Verity’s supposed crimes, Lowen and Jeremy’s affair, and the tragic history of the Crawford children, there’s simply too much competing for attention at once. I found myself losing track of what I was actually supposed to be paying attention to, which is a strange thing to say about a film built around a single central mystery. It doesn’t help that some of these threads get resolved so quickly that they barely register before the next reveal comes crashing in.
To the film’s credit, Anne Hathaway does elevate things considerably once the story finally lets her. She plays Verity with just enough ambiguity that even the film’s late, jarring letter reveal, which recontextualises everything you thought you knew, lands with real weight instead of feeling like a cheap rug-pull. It’s genuinely one of the more interesting performances in the film, and it’s a shame it takes so long to get proper screen time.
Verity isn’t a bad adaptation, but it’s an uneven one. The slow, meandering first half and the overstuffed back half make this a film that demands a lot of patience for a payoff that, while satisfying in Anne Hathaway’s hands, doesn’t quite justify the wait. If you’re a die-hard Colleen Hoover fan, you’ll probably forgive the pacing issues for the twist alone. If you’re coming in cold, though, be prepared to sit through a fair bit of narrative fog before the film finally decides what kind of story it wants to tell.
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