Film Review: VERITY (2026): A Flat Thriller Lacking the Essential Ingredients for a Successful Dramatic Film

Verity Review

Verity (2026) Film Review, a movie directed by Michael Showalter, written by Nick Antosca and Colleen Hoover and starring Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett, Brady Wagner, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Irina Dvorovenko, Sienna Kulovitz, K.K. Moggie, Tom Galantich, Lou Martini Jr., Michael Abbott Jr., Clark Carmichael, Stephen Elrod, Nathan Tylutki, Thursday Farrar, Asel Swango and Daniel Echevarria. 

Filmmaker Michael Showalter creates as generic a thriller as possible with the ridiculous and overstuffed, Verity. This film had some potential to be creative with its bizarre, yet familiar, premise, which feels like it has been done at least a half dozen times before, although not recently enough for unsuspecting moviegoers to notice. Dakota Johnson stars in a role that is among her worst yet. She plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling novelist in the big city whose work is going unnoticed, most recently drawing almost zero interest at a book signing as the film begins. Before digging any deeper into the plot, it must be said that this is the most implausible movie of any release this year. That’s not to say there aren’t some entertaining stretches. They’re just few and far between.

Lowen gets the gig of a lifetime when she is offered to ghostwrite some books that a now disabled popular novelist, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), can’t finish. Of course, this being the movies, the offer is ridiculously financially prosperous to ghostwrite these books, and Lowen rejects the offer at first until conferring with her agent, who suggests she ask for even more money than the nice amount she rejected.

There’s more ludicrousy in this movie’s early plot development as well. Lowen gets splattered with blood from a biker who is hit in the street by a vehicle. A mysterious man (Josh Hartnett) offers to help clean her up for her job interview, and proceeds to give her the shirt off his back. Wouldn’t you guess that this gentleman actually turns out to be Verity’s husband, Jeremy? This film kicks off with one silly development after another, leading to the proposal that Lowen will have to write in Verity’s large home and keep her association with the publisher a secret, which means she must sign a pesky disclosure agreement.

So, the wheelchair bound Verity is supposedly paralyzed, but Lowen catches her giving her a dirty look as Lowen peeks out the window. Is Verity in danger with her husband and faking her disability? Are some of the passages Verity wrote in her work proof that she is an abuser of her children or that Jeremy could be more than the nice guy he appears to be on the surface? There’s an obligatory scene of Lowen in a tub nude, and a baffling scene where the son of Verity, Crew (Brady Wagner), cuts his tongue with a knife and is rushed to a doctor by Jeremy. None of it adds up to anything that could be deemed close to interesting, even if flashbacks between Verity and Jeremy provide some steamy romantic scenes that could please less demanding moviegoers.

Verity is essentially a big studio bomb, but it’s not the worst movie of the year. Far from it. Hathaway seems to be having fun in the flashbacks and in the wickedly humorous scenes where she shares her ideas on writing and her success before she becomes “disabled.” Johnson needs to go back to the arthouse movies that keep her on track to one day securing a potential Oscar nomination. It’s a big downfall to go from great films like The Peanut Butter Falcon and Cha Cha Real Smooth to trite movies like this by-the-numbers thriller that hardly has any heart integrated into the proceedings.

Verity (or a fictional version of Verity, not completely sure) talks about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in one scene. Jeremy goes to work while she puts headphones on and lets her two babies cry all day with little to no supervision. This is all in extremely bad taste, whether it’s meant to be taken seriously or not. Furthermore, the twists mount considerably and often feel like they are not adequately addressed by the time the end credits roll. Hathaway has fun some of the time, but she is basically reduced to just sitting around for most of the movie, not saying a word. Josh Hartnett is also completely unlikable in his part here from the moment he appears on-screen, which doesn’t bode well for the film’s attempts to trick the viewer into respecting his character.

Verity is handsomely made from a technical standpoint. There is also some true dread in the fact that Johnson’s character is essentially trapped in a big house with a bunch of weirdos until she finishes her work ghostwriting the books which will seemingly earn her a significant amount of money. Alfred Hitchcock may have made this film work if he were still alive and making movies, but although Michael Showalter has done good work in the past, thrillers aren’t necessarily his forte, judging from the mundane conclusion of this major disappointment.

Rating: 5/10

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