Variety Pans 'Verity' as 'Flat-Footed Dud' — SkimNews
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- "Verity" is the fourth Colleen Hoover film adaptation in two years, with prior entries ("It Ends With Us," "Regretting You," "Reminders of Him") collectively grossing over $500 million, but Variety pans this one as a "flat-footed dud" that fails to make Hoover's appeal "clear to the unconverted"
- Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling novelist hired to finish a bestselling thriller series after moving into the lakeside home of Anne Hathaway's paralyzed, speechless author Verity Crawford, where she discovers a secret manuscript
- Michael Showalter directs Hathaway again after the well-received "The Idea of You," though Variety says the film's "po-faced eroticism and high-camp melodramatic lurches" are "perversely ill-suited to his skill set"
- Nick Antosca's script is faulted for labeling and boldfacing "supposed ambiguities at every turn," with the film taking "more than an hour to reach so much as a low boil" and punctuating reveals with literal thunderclaps
- The film opens with a bizarre meet-cute where a cyclist is killed by a car and blood splatters across Johnson, before Josh Hartnett's Jeremy Crawford offers the oddly chosen line: "I've seen worse... I pulled my eight-year-old girl's body out of a lake"
- Variety compares the film unfavorably to Paul Feig's "The Housemaid," calling "Verity" "all lacquer with no liftoff" — haltingly paced, stilted, and "never remotely sexy" despite a limo and rock-carved bathtub scene
Why it matters: The scathing Variety review targets "Verity," the fourth Colleen Hoover adaptation in two years — a run whose prior films collectively grossed over $500 million despite Variety's contention that none has made Hoover's appeal "clear to the unconverted." For director Michael Showalter, reuniting with Hathaway after "The Idea of You," the drubbing underscores Hollywood's struggle to convert the novelist's commercial power into a viable film.
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