It was the teeth marks on the wooden bed frame that tripped things into cloud coocooland.
If that reference doesn’t make any sense to you, then you haven’t yet watched Verity, director Michael Showalter’s big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling 2018 novel, described generously as a “psychological romantic thriller.” And, not to be too critical or anything, but you’re probably better off for it.
What does it mean to be a best-seller? Well, in Hoover’s case it means to have been, as of Oct. 18th, on the New York Times’ “Combined Print & E-Book Fiction” list for a total of 103 weeks.
Given that, you’d think that director Showalter would have an easy time making Hoover’s novel into a hit movie. And to be fair, Verity is performing well at the box office having made – at the beginning of this week – some $117 million world-wide on an estimated $40 million budget. That’s what the film industry calls a success.
But as with all things in life, monetary success doesn’t necessarily equate to aesthetic quality. As for the teeth marks, more on that topic later.
See, Hoover’s book – as adapted by screenwriter Nick Antosca – centers on Lowen Ashleigh (played by Dakota Johnson), a writer who is both grieving the death of her mother and mourning the fact that her novels aren’t attracting much attention. We know this from an early scene depicting her reading to a sparse, and seemingly bored, bookstore audience.
But then, suddenly, things change. Her agent tells her of a great opportunity, which involves her finishing a novel of the best-selling writer Verity Crawford (played by Anne Hathaway). And on the way to meet the publisher, she runs into an attractive man (played by Josh Hartnett) who, seeing that her blouse is stained, ends up literally giving her the shirt off his back. Right.
Turns out the man is Jeremy Crawford, Verity’s husband, and he assures Lowen that she is the perfect person for the job. In short order, Lowen finds herself living with the Crawfords in a house – a mansion to be clear – nestled in a remote but scenic Vermont glade next to a glimmering lake.
That’s where she discovers Verity herself, unable to move since being severely injured in a car accident, lying in bed or propped up in a chair, tended to either by an assistant or by husband Jeremy 24 hours a day. This is the best-selling author whose writing style Lowen is being hired to emulate.
Strange things, though, start to occur. In checking Verity’s files, Lowen comes across a secret autobiography that alerts her that not everything in the house is what it seems – especially the story that Lowen has been told about the death of the Crawfords’ daughter, who had drowned in that nearby lake.
Worse, Lowen begins to imagine things that make her suspect Verity might not be as incapacitated as she seems.
And this is where the film really starts to fall apart. For one thing, there’s the predictable attraction between Lowen and Jeremy. For another, there’s the change in both Lowen’s and Jeremy’s attitudes, which makes them both suddenly act more calculating than they initially appeared.
Throughout all this, Johnson is her trademark lethargic self, delivering lines in a near-monotone fashion that lacks any real emotion. In other films, working with the likes of Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in 2015’s A Bigger Splash or with Sean Penn in 2023’s Daddio, Johnson has performed credibly. But not here.
That said, give Johnson this much credit: No one – not even the far more skilled Hartnett nor Hathaway – could make the sex scenes that Showalter attempts to make sexy look anything close to believable.
I mean, seriously, who bites into a wooden headboard even in the throes of passion? If nothing else, Verity should get an X rating from the American Dental Association.