{"link":"/movies/verity/","rating":3,"review":"Michael Showalter adapts Colleen Hoover's thriller about a struggling writer hired to finish the series of a famous author who can no longer write. Lowen Ashleigh moves into the Crawford house to go through Verity's notes. There she finds a manuscript that makes her question everything about the family. The premise is pure airport paperback, and it has never been as clever as its fans think. Showalter, who made The Big Sick and The Eyes of Tammy Faye, plays it straight. The result is a glossy, watchable thriller that never rises above its source.\n\nDakota Johnson plays Lowen, and she is hard to review. There is something likable in her screen presence, and every film makes you want to root for her. Then the performance arrives. Her line readings are halting, her reactions to the horrors in the house rarely feel believable, and her emotional range stays flat in scenes that need panic or dread. A thriller told from her point of view needs us to feel what she feels. Johnson keeps the audience at arm's length.\n\nThe rest of the cast picks up the slack. Josh Hartnett is convincing as Jeremy Crawford. He plays the grieving husband with warmth and a hint of something guarded, and he keeps you guessing about him. Anne Hathaway overdelivers as Verity. She makes the most of limited screen time, and the manuscript sequences come alive whenever she is in them. She plays the character with a lurid, unsettling relish that the rest of the film can't match. Every time the story cuts back to Lowen, the temperature drops.\n\nShowalter keeps things moving, and the house has a cold, expensive menace. The script follows the novel closely, twists and all, but it can't make the premise less silly. Verity is a perfectly average adaptation of a perfectly average book. Hathaway and Hartnett make it worth a look. Johnson makes it hard to care.","slug":"verity","tagline":"A middling adaptation of a so-so premise, held up by Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. Dakota Johnson is at the center of it, and that is the problem.","title":"Verity","year":2026}