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Verity 2026 Had Everything It Needed to Go Feral and Chose to Sit Still Instead
Anne Hathaway is unhinged, Josh Hartnett is a snack, and the movie around them refuses to commit
Let me be upfront so nobody comes for me later. I’m a Colleen Hoover hater. I’ve read her books. I read them the way some people watch dumpster fires, with my hand over my mouth, hate-flipping pages. Her writing makes me feel insane.
So no, I did not walk into Verity 2026 as a fan of the source material. I walked in because the cast is absurd. You put Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in the same frame and expect me to stay home? Be so for real. That alone got my butt in the seat.
And look, the premise slaps. A struggling ghostwriter moves into a dying author's gorgeous creepy house, finds a hidden memoir where the wife confesses to monstrous things, and has to figure out whether she's living with a killer while catching feelings for the husband. That's a dark, twisted, deliciously messed up setup.
Which is exactly why I spent two hours quietly screaming at the screen, because this movie had every ingredient for a banger and kept pulling its punches.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿/5
What’s This One About?
Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is a broke writer hired to finish the book series of famous author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who's catatonic after a car accident.
She moves into the Crawford estate with Verity's husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and their creepy little son, digs through Verity's papers, and uncovers a confessional manuscript that reads like Verity admitting to horrifying things about her own children.
Then the house starts doing that thing where maybe the catatonic woman upstairs isn't so catatonic. Sparks fly, secrets pile up, and a late twist asks you to decide what was real.
Anne Hathaway Understood the Assignment
Hathaway is the entire reason to watch this. She spends a huge chunk of the movie as a voiceover, reading Verity's memoir aloud, and the way she slithers through those confessions is genuinely unsettling.
She goes full Stepford-wife-gone-wrong, chewing every piece of scenery she can get her teeth on, and in a movie this restrained she's the one person who seems to know she's in a pulpy psychological thriller. Every second she's on screen, the whole thing wakes up.
Josh Hartnett continues his glorious resurgence, and I am thrilled about it. He plays Jeremy as this soft golden-retriever husband with just enough darkness humming underneath, and he's weirdly the most grounded, watchable thing in the cast. Shirtless, too, which, listen, I'm a woman of simple needs.
Dakota Johnson is Dakota Johnson.
She does the breathy, subdued, resting-bored-face thing she always does, and honestly, for a character who's supposed to be a quiet outsider slowly losing her grip, it half works. But she barely rises above a whisper the whole film, and when she's sharing scenes with Hathaway going full gothic monster, the energy gap is a canyon.
Where Verity 2026 Lost Me
The pacing drags something awful. You're sitting there knowing a twist is coming, waiting and waiting, while the film takes forever to get anywhere. And then the twist, the team manuscript vs. team letter reveal, gets crammed into the final few minutes with zero room to breathe.
The most interesting idea in the whole thing, the question of which version of Verity is the truth, shows up right as the credits are warming up. It should have landed halfway through so the rest of the movie could play in that ambiguity.
Also, for a supposed erotic thriller, there's shockingly little heat. One Dakota bathtub scene and that's your lot. If you're going to invoke the sweaty early-2000s thriller era, you have to actually bring the sweat.
My Final Verdict
Hathaway is magnetic, Hartnett is a delight, the house is gorgeous, and the bones of a genuinely nasty thriller are all right there. But the movie is too timid to use them. It wanted to be respectable when it should have wanted to be unhinged.
As a CoHo hater, I take grim satisfaction in reporting that even a cast this stacked couldn't fully save the material.
If you love the book, you'll probably have fun. If you're me, you'll leave wishing someone had handed this premise to a director willing to get their hands bloody.
Are you team manuscript or team letter? Did Anne Hathaway carry this on her back as hard as I think she did? And be honest, fellow CoHo haters, did you also only show up for the cast? Meet me in the comments; I have grievances to air.
