REVIEW: ‘Verity’ Is Unbelievably, Deliciously Campy

“There is no light where we’re going,” Verity (Anne Hathaway) warns in the author’s note of her viciously incriminating, black-hearted autobiography. There may be no light ahead, but the darkness inherent to Verity (2026), based on Colleen Hoover‘s 2018 bestseller, is a campy thrill ride that aggressively leans into its silliness, to varied success.

Lowen (Dakota Johnson) is an author whose latest work is underselling. Her writing, nonetheless, has captured the attention of Verity Crawford, a bestselling author so famous she has—bafflingly—transcended the trappings of traditional author fame and is enough of a name to merit appearing on Hot Ones and Call Her Daddy. It’s a surprising win for Lowen, who, in addition to her low book sales, recently lost her mother and is about to be evicted from her apartment.

Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) approaches Lowen with an offer she can’t refuse. He’s been running his wife’s career following a car accident that has mysteriously rendered his wife unable to finish the final installments of her popular book series. Knowing Verity is a fan of Lowen’s work, Jeremy asks Lowen to ghostwrite the books and visit the Crawford family home to parse through notes and research.

Dakota Johnson’s Lowen discovers the truth behind an authors facade in Verity. 

When Lowen arrives at the Crawfords’ home in rural Vermont, she discovers that Verity has been hidden from the public for months because she is paralyzed and unable to speak as a result of a car accident. The Crawfords suffered enormously even before her accident; eight months earlier, their young daughter Harper (Sienna Kulovitz) drowned in the lake near their home. Harper’s twin brother Crew (Brady Wagner) is suspiciously well-adjusted for a kid who’s endured an unfathomable amount of tragedy, but this is only the beginning of the strange occurrences at the Crawford home.

The film departs from Hoover’s usual weepy melodramas, swapping overwrought romance for erotic thrills and twisted minds. Lowen discovers a hidden flash drive containing a draft of Verity’s autobiography, revealing her not to be the loving wife and mother Jeremy and Crew remember, but a vicious, vindictive woman who feels that Crew and Harper were a threat to being the object of Jeremy’s affection. Verity’s candid confessions make Lowen realize that Jeremy and Crew have no idea who Verity really is.

Though Lowen is the protagonist, it’s Hathaway’s film, having to play Verity as Lowen imagines her, Verity as she describes herself in her own words, and Verity as she really is. Each of Verity’s facets is believably distinct without forgetting that these interpretations make a unified, if contradictory whole, and Hathaway succeeds at each.

This is Anne Hathaway’s film. 

Verity’s the most layered by far. Johnson makes the most of Lowen’s thankless role as an audience surrogate. Hartnett’s Jeremy is charming, but the script lets him down when it comes to giving Jeremy believable depth beyond being a good father and grieving husband.

Director Michael Showalter‘s career has largely been built on comedies you wouldn’t think of as an obvious pedigree for a campy erotic thriller. But comedies require a certain grasp of elevating a tone, heightening circumstances that might, in real life, be mildly funny and transforming them into something gut-bustingly hilarious. The same is true of the films inherent campiness; Hathaway’s narration sounds as though she has been directed to speak with the cadence of an ASMR video while maintaining a normal volume and a quasi-transatlantic accent.

Verity is deliciously fun, aided by Volker Bertelmann’s dramatic, sweeping score (a skill perfected with Conclave and All Quiet on the Western Front), and when it takes itself too seriously, it succeeds at being the kind of mindlessly engaging thriller that was a dime a dozen in the 1990s. But when the film tries to establish itself as the kind of film that could take place in real life, beyond the confines of the Crawfords’ architecturally impressive yet structurally cold home, it loses any credibility.

The attempts to bring realism to this elevated world fall flat. 

We’re expected to believe that she is famous enough to be on Hot Ones even though it seems fundamentally impossible that a best-selling thriller author would be on a show about eating increasingly hot chicken wings. To make Verity famous enough to transcend authorial fame means she must be the most famous woman in the world.

But in an age of fervent Internet sleuthing, how can Jeremy have kept her so hidden from the world? Her accident has been kept under wraps. It’s the kind of film that collapses if you give its outside world a modicum of thought, but great fun to dissect its characters’ motivations along the way.

You have to be all in with Verity from the get-go, understanding that it is as subtle as a freight train. Lowen and Jeremy have what can only be described as the opposite of a meet-cute, meeting seconds after Lowen is splattered with the blood of a pedestrian fatally struck by a car. She looks like a final girl at the end of a horror film. Her horrors are just getting started, but for the audience, that’s where the real fun begins. There is no light where we’re going, but if you check your brain at the door, you’ll embrace the darkness, too.

Verity (2026) is out now in theaters.