Verity

We’re not quite in October yet and Verity is now the fourth Anne Hathaway movie released this year that I’ve seen. Bizarrely, there is a fifth I haven’t yet seen, a little movie that’s grossed nearly $2 billion worldwide and has generated some Best Supporting Actress buzz for my fellow elder millennial. That’s right, I might be the only person alive who has seen Mother Mary, The End of Oak Street, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and now Verity while missing The Odyssey.

It’s not often you see an actor star in five movies in the course of one year, let alone a 43-year-old actress in some really big movies. It’s been twenty-five years since a teenaged Hathaway made her debut in The Princess Diaries and she’s already exceeded the typical starlet window by about two decades. How has she done it? Good genes have helped, as she’s holding onto her leading lady looks far longer than movie stars of yore. But, more meaningfully, Hathaway has displayed wisdom in the projects she’s chosen. Instead of sticking with the family-friendly fare with which she got her start, she followed up the second Princess Diaries with a role in Brokeback Mountain. Then, she diversified: a mainstream comedy, a big summer spy action farce, an indie drama, an ensemble romcom, then back to Disney for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Many actors find their niche and stick with the tried and true, but Hathaway proved she could headline a blockbuster and also snag an Oscar nomination for a Jonathan Demme movie and a win for the musical Les Misérables.

The public may assume that an Oscar win immediately and irreversibly advances a career, but that’s often not the case. If anything, Hathaway’s win and cringeworthy “it came true” acceptance speech seemed to put her popularity at an all-time low. Fortunately for her, she had already by then teamed up with Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight Rises. If you’re going to form a long-term alliance with a filmmaker, Nolan is about as solid a choice as anyone this century. She has since reteamed with him on Interstellar and this summer’s The Odyssey, ensuring she’s an integral part of some of the most widely-seen and dearly beloved films of our time. And though she has undoubtedly secured generational wealth over the course of the past quarter-century, Hathaway has kept busy, busy, busy this year, daring us to comment upon the kind of overexposure that makes Pedro Pascal seem like a slacker.

To boot, there has been tremendous variety to Hathaway’s 2026 output. There’s no mistaking any one of her five movies for another. Verity keeps that streak intact. This adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s dark psychological thriller probably will not bring a ton of moviegoers who have already seen Hathaway on the big screen this year back to the multiplex. I can’t say there is much reason to return because even though this is the only one of Hathaway’s 2026 quintet that I’ve seen in theaters, it’s also the weakest of the bunch (barring Nolan delivering a most uncharacteristic disappointment of epic proportions). But Hathaway isn’t much to blame for that. Despite filling the title role, serving as the face of the marketing campaign, and sharing diagonal top billing, the actress performs rather peripherally here in a mix of flashbacks and catatonia.

The foreground of the film belongs to Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, an underappreciated writer of dark novels who is tapped to take over the flagship series of bestsellers penned by the uber successful Verity Crawford. After signing an NDA and being convinced that she was hand-picked to replace Crawford, Lowen reluctantly leaves the Manhattan studio apartment she’s being evicted from for an indefinite stay at the opulent lakeside Vermont residence of the Crawfords. She is surprised to learn that a car accident has left Verity speechless and immobile. But there are years worth of notes for Lowen to explore to continue the lucrative line of thrillers told from a villain’s point of view.

Despite that premise, Verity is more concerned with having Lowen sift through some shocking confessions she discovers on a USB drive involving Verity’s marriage to Jeremy (Hartnett) and their twin children, one of whom recently died in a canoe accident. Lowen grows increasingly convinced that Verity may have some sociopathic tendencies. She also might be faking her paralysis.

There are some fascinating ideas, or at least seeds of them, in the conception of Verity. The Crawfords’ New England estate is remarkably idyllic and the notion of a struggling author getting picked to take over an established one’s legacy is an intriguing concept I haven’t encountered before. But you can tell from this that Hoover isn’t an especially imaginative writer, something It Ends with Us strongly suggested before inspiring the entertainment world’s most embarrassing use of the legal system to date. Hoover can’t even throw out some ideas of what a modern-day psychological bestseller might look like and instead of exploring the creative process, Verity simply presents the author’s past as her evident inspiration. And yet, somehow, Hoover, who could relate to Lowen’s life as a struggling artist given her own background in self-publishing, has sold millions of copies of this and other books. In literature, as in the movie business, success and quality do not always go hand in hand.

Michael Showalter, reuniting with Hathaway two years after The Idea of You, continues to trend downward as a director. It has nearly been a decade since The Big Sick marked his creative peak at the helm and despite guiding Jessica Chastain to a Best Actress Oscar in 2021’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Showalter has been unable to recapture the immense entertainment value and humanity of Kumail Nanjiani’s unconventional, autobiographical romantic comedy. And yet, deliberate or not, Verity elicits some chuckles on occasion with its preposterous premise approaching camp. Given his background in TV’s “Chucky” and “Brand New Flavor”, screenwriter Nick Antosca seems in on the joke and presumably is responsible for the most memorable line in the movie. (You’ll know it when you hear it.)

En route to an inevitably inane twist ending, the film remains extremely watchable as an awkward blend of trashy thriller and erotic romance. You’d think Johnson would avoid signing on for anything with steamy sex scenes after the Fifty Shades trilogy ran its course. She seems rather disinterested here, like she’s willing to make this only because the primary audience — the one that gobbled up The Housemaid last Christmas — is not all that discerning or hard to please. I mean that and the millions of dollars she was paid.

Hartnett, on the other hand, seems downright giddy that he is back to filling lead roles in big studio movies, something he hadn’t done in nearly twenty years before popping up in Nolan’s Oppenheimer and starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap. You can sure tell he’s enjoying doing what he was doing on a regular basis in his early twenties.

Despite less than glowing reviews, Verity is likely to give Hathaway her third #1 opening of the year. If it performs well, you can probably expect more of these female-friendly thrillers to crop up in search of that $400 million worldwide Housemaid money. Hey, technically, they still are making movies for adults, I guess.