Verity (Movie – 2026)

I didn’t love the Verity book, so the movie was never on my must-see list. Then I had a slow day with nothing to do, and a ticket seemed like a better use of my afternoon than staring at my phone. I walked into a packed theater fully expecting to hate-watch the whole thing, which is a strange mindset to bring to a movie you paid for, but I stand by it. If you haven’t read the book, the setup is that Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is a struggling writer who gets hired to finish the bestselling series of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who can no longer write after a serious accident. Lowen moves into the Crawford home to go through Verity’s notes, and while she’s there, she finds an unfinished autobiography that Verity never intended anyone to read. Her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) is hovering around the whole time, grieving, helpful, and a little too easy to get attached to.

My Biggest Complaint

I’ll get my biggest complaint out of the way first. I am so tired of seeing Anne Hathaway in everything, and her over-the-top facial expressions annoy me more than I can put into words. A story like Verity depends on the audience not being sure what to believe, which means it needs a performance that makes you lean in and try to read the person on screen. Hathaway’s choices made me…laugh. Every raised eyebrow and exaggerated reaction felt like it was so unnecessary, and when a character is supposed to unsettle you, that kind of broadcasting takes the air out of the room. This is entirely a matter of taste, and I’m sure plenty of people will find her magnetic, but I spent a good portion of the movie wanting the camera to be somewhere else.

Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett Make Up for It

Luckily, I’m a big fan of both Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, and they did a lot of the heavy lifting for me. Johnson is our way into the story, and watching Lowen move through that house while she pieces together what she’s reading gives the movie a steadier center than I expected it to have. Her low-key delivery also works as a nice contrast to the louder performance happening around her. Hartnett, meanwhile, is exactly the kind of casting I’m always happy to see, and having him in a role with real screen time felt like a small gift. Because I was already inclined to like them, I’ll admit I may be a generous judge here, but they gave me enough to care about that I stopped counting down the minutes.

The Giggles I Had to Swallow

There were a handful of moments where I had to stifle a giggle, and none of them were meant to be funny. When a movie is aiming for tension or melodrama and lands somewhere slightly off, the laugh arrives before you can stop it, and in a packed theater you suddenly become very aware of every person around you. Nobody wants to be the lone laugher during a serious scene, so I sat there with my shoulders shaking and my face frozen into what I hoped looked like deep concentration. It’s a funny little quirk of group behavior, since the pressure to match the room’s mood is strong enough that I’d rather suffer through a private laughing fit than risk coming across as an asshole to strangers I’ll never see again. To be clear, I wasn’t laughing at the movie in a mean way, but the unintentional humor was real, and it kept me more entertained than I expected to be.

Is the Verity Movie Better Than the Book?

For me, yes. I went in assuming this would be a hate-watch, and by the end I’d landed on “mostly ok,” which is a better outcome than I predicted. I can’t point to one single change that fixed things, and part of it may simply be that two hours is a much smaller commitment than a novel I wasn’t enjoying. Whatever the reason, I was never bored, and I wasn’t gritting my teeth through the story the way I was on the page. If you read the book and liked it, I can’t promise the movie will land the same way for you, but if you read it and came away lukewarm like I did, the film is an easier and more watchable version of the same story.

Who Should Watch Verity

I’d recommend the Verity movie to fans of Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, people who enjoy Colleen Hoover adaptations, and anyone who wants a mid-level thriller on a free afternoon. If you’re a die-hard Hathaway fan, you’ll probably get more out of it than I did. It isn’t a movie I’d tell you to rush out and see, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it, but if it happens to be playing when you have a slow day of your own, it’s a perfectly fine way to spend one.