Verity is in theaters now.
In a Guardian piece on how Colleen Hoover turned a worldwide best-selling creator, one YA fan that was interviewed by the paper urged it was as a result of she’s “writing for individuals who don’t like studying.” If that is the case, then one might argue that the movie variations of her work are for individuals who don’t love cinema.
Now that I’ve watched all 4 movies impressed by her literary prose — 2024’s It Ends with Us, 2025’s Regretting You, this 12 months’s Reminders of Him, and now Verity — I am making that case. For these should not variations that make any try to elevate the middling narratives fumbling round Hoover’s novels; I realised this when studying It Ends with Us after struggling by means of the film, and I vowed by no means to learn one other.
With Verity, I had extra hope that it might buck the development. Divorced from the sentimentality of earlier variations, this story opens with a meet-cute that’ll provide you with whiplash. After introducing Anne Hathaway’s best-selling creator Verity Crawford by means of interviews with the likes of Gayle King, the place she discusses the darkness in her writing, struggling author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) enters the chat. Lowen’s agent has landed her a gathering with Crawford’s publishing home for a mysterious job alternative, however on the best way, she not solely witnesses a highway accident however is drenched within the blood of the bicycle owner concerned. It is an opener as on the market because the one in Meet Joe Black (IYKYK), nevertheless it does present a possibility for Josh Hartnett’s good-looking stranger to step in and assist clear her up.
In typical Hoover trend, the pair trauma bond: He tells her he dragged his lifeless daughter out of a lake, and she or he says her mom died of most cancers the week earlier than. There’s no construct up, just a few awkward exposition-dumping in a males’s rest room. They’re quickly reunited on the publishing home, the place it’s revealed that he is Verity’s husband, Jeremy. He and the editors wish to fee Lowen to complete his spouse’s novel collection; Verity is in a comatose state after a automotive accident and can’t communicate or transfer. So, with little deliberation and as a result of shoehorned incontrovertible fact that Lowen can also be being evicted from her New York condo, she packs up and strikes into the Crawfords’ sprawling Vermont house for six months.
There she meets Verity, a shell of her glamorous self carrying a glazed stare. This is among the few scenes the ladies share; most of Hathaway’s efficiency is marginalised to interviews on the likes of Scorching Ones and the Name Her Daddy podcast, in addition to flashbacks layered with sultry voiceovers as Lowen reads Verity’s secret autobiography. Each time she picks it up, sentences run throughout the display screen, and sometimes Lowen is superimposed over scenes from the previous to attempt to enliven the act of studying. It does not.
What’s most infuriating is how lengthy it takes Lowen to complete the textual content. It’s unbelievable that an creator would consistently run away from the autobiography to masturbate and go on a date with Jeremy, given how unflinching Verity’s candour is. She reveals juicy particulars about her marriage and hints that their daughter’s loss of life may not have been an accident — how did she not end it in a single sitting? Nothing screams “padding for time” greater than this tedious set-up, engaging in little in the best way of ingratiating the viewer with Johnson’s “decide me” lady protagonist.
Nor does it scratch the floor of who Jeremy really is past the one-dimensional trope of a swoon-worthy husband. Screenwriter Nick Antosca, who lately impressed together with his adaptation of Cape Concern, hints at some resentment on Jeremy’s half for his spouse’s success, however the script by no means probes deeper than in a ultimate act reveal that flings the lacking items at you in a single blink. The perfect Antosca presents is an examination of the reliability of the narrator, however even that effort is phoned in. Michael Showalter’s route is equally uninteresting, conveying little of the imaginative and prescient seen in his Oscar-nominated movies, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and The Large Sick. As an alternative, it plods an uneven, uninspiring route into cliché and lazy conference.
That Anne Hathaway has been on an beautiful run of massive display screen releases from The Odyssey and Mom Mary to The Finish of Oak Road and The Satan Wears Prada 2 makes this, her final 2026 efficiency, much more disappointing. What a lead balloon for everybody concerned — one which proves a moratorium on Colleen Hoover variations is lengthy overdue. To misquote Woman Catherine from Delight and Prejudice: “Are the shades of cinema to be thus polluted?”