Verity Review

Verity is Michael Showalter's film of Colleen Hoover's 2018 thriller, adapted by Nick Antosca. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired by Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) to finish the series his wife Verity (Anne Hathaway), a bestselling author, can no longer write after an accident; in the Crawford house Lowen finds a manuscript that reads like a confession. Amazon MGM released it on October 2, 2026, after a London premiere, and it opened at No. 1 in North America with about $32.6 million and passed $119 million worldwide within two weeks.

Critics agreed on one thing, and it was Hathaway, who plays the heightened material at full tilt; several felt Johnson and Hartnett never matched her pitch. Beyond her the notices were poor: 31 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes from 180 reviews, 44 on Metacritic and a C+ CinemaScore from opening night audiences, so the crowd was not much warmer than the critics.

The consensus calls it a film with all the ingredients of a guilty pleasure that leans more towards guilty than pleasurable, and finds its twists landing as letdowns rather than hooks. The Daily Beast's Nick Schager singled out a script without subtlety and a run of unintentional laughs, while IndieWire, at a B minus, and Screen Rant were kinder about its trashier pleasures. Jim Frohna's photography and Volker Bertelmann's score keep it polished.

Hathaway lifts the acting to a B. The rest is a thriller whose surprises do not surprise and whose lines draw laughs in the wrong places, so plot and dialogue sit at D, and it is a D.