Verity – Film Review
by Brian Merriman

Directed by Michael Showalter
Screenplay by Nick Antosca
Based on the book by Colleen Hoover
Starring:  Anne Hathaway (who also produces),  Dakota Johnson,  Josh Hartnett,  Ismael Cruz Cordova,  Brady Wagner
Composer Volker Bertelmann

A thin line separates fiction from truth, or is there? Verity as a name derives from Veritas – the Latin word for truth. The search for the truth is the pulse of this sinister thriller that leaves us with as many questions just after we think we’ve witnessed the answers!

We have the staple essentials of a good thriller plot. An exotic but remote location, a storm, a previous death, even an intermittent electricity supply and an atmospheric score by Volker Bertelmann. There are also some over-dressed sexual scenes. But some of these elements are only incidental to the plots and twists we encounter as Verity Crawford (an unflappable Anne Hathaway), a best-selling author, is incapacitated, so that she can not finish her bounty of best-selling crime stories in her vast collection.

Josh Hartnett is her un-anoracked husband, who combines new family responsibilities with finding a ghostwriter to maintain his wife’s lucrative dark voices in her unfinished novel series.

There is a lot more to Verity than just the truth. She is one complex character and, like all good writers, is well able to dispassionately expose her murderous and immoral characters in her novels. A key consideration is: is there any personal truth in the values, or lack of them, that she puts down on paper? Is her husband sleeping with the enemy, or is she?

Barely discovered thriller novelist Lowen Asheigh, an intense Dakota Johnson, mirrors Verity physically and in her writing capabilities. The eternally youthful Hathaway is silent for a large portion of the plot, yet her voice ricochets around the lavish lakeside home which her success has provided for her family.

Hartnett as Jeremy Crawford is both victim and perpetrator, seduced by Johnson’s Lowen,  as she moves in, shares Verity’s marital bedroom and wardrobe and family.  Lowen chases the real story, unravels the complex plot and, like any good author, is not afraid to jump to conclusions and justify them.

Once a new plot element is unpacked, Nick Antosca’s layered screenplay brings us through Colleen Hoover’s intricate story with style and authenticity.

No one is who they seem to be, not even Clay, an accomplished Brady Wagner, the well-played 8-year-old, who does his best to keep his secrets. There are many secrets to be kept!

Add to that intrigue a strong dose of retribution, ambition, revenge and dysfunction and in Verity, we have a thriller that engages, which keeps ratcheting up the tension and constantly unleashes question after question, meaning that the only key element that remains absent is the truth…or is it?