Under the studio lights of Hot Ones, across the table from host Sean Evans, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) looks every inch the bestselling novelist with the enviable life. We have seen a sliver of this interview before, playing on a laptop while someone else watched. Now it fills the frame, and for once nothing stands between Verity and the audience: no laptop screen, no manuscript page.
The footage comes from before: before the car wreck that left her silent, before a writer moved into her house to take over her work, before the night her husband and that writer carried her body down to the lake. The interview is the film’s final image, and Verity gets the closing line, a remark about certainty. Verity’s return to its title character at its very end is a bold way to close a story that declines to say whether she was a sociopathic monster or the ultimate tragedy.
It is also, for director Michael Showalter and author Colleen Hoover, the entire idea. Showalter’s Verity adapts Hoover’s 2018 novel, a self-published thriller that became one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits in contemporary publishing. In the book, Lowen, a broke writer grieving her mother, is hired to finish Verity’s series, which the latter can no longer write herself; a car accident has seemingly left her unable to speak or even comprehend what’s going on around her.
In Verity’s office, Lowen finds So Be It, an autobiographical manuscript Verity wrote before her accident, in which she confesses to resenting her twin children, Harper and Crew, and to letting Harper drown in the lake behind the house. She also finds Jeremy, Verity’s husband, grieving and attentive, and growing closer to her by the day. The film keeps the shape of Hoover’s ending, including its refusal to definitively explain what really happened inside that house.
What it changes is who speaks last. It’s scary, it’s sexy, it’s surprising. I wanted to preserve those moments that are like, whoa, that just happened.” Hoover, a producer on the film, had a simpler test.
The film opens not on Lowen but on Verity, mid-interview, with Gayle King marveling at one of the best-selling authors on the planet and Verity calling her life “all a miracle.” Some could say, King replies, “it’s a miracle built on villains,” a line that hangs over everything that follows. On a Manhattan sidewalk outside Grand Central, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), headphones on, is spattered with a stranger’s blood when a car strikes a cyclist nearby. The man who walks her to a coffee-shop bathroom and hands her a clean white shirt is Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), who seems steadier than she is.
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