Director Michael Showalter and author Colleen Hoover reveal the ending to erotic thriller “Verity” was very different before focus group screenings steered them in another direction. SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Verity,” now playing in theaters. To say that “Verity,” a new erotic thriller featuring the ubiquitous Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson — who gets to call the former “a selfish, Machiavellian cunt” — has sharply divided critics would be an understatement.
This thing has taken a bigger beating than a piece of beef hanging in Rocky Balboa’s meat locker (our own critic called it a “a flat-footed dud”). And the majority of the film’s detractors took issue with its ending. (It is still predicted to win the box office weekend, becoming Hathaway’s third No. 1 movie this year.) Directed by Michael Showalter (“Search Party”) and adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, the film tells the tale of Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), a struggling young author who’s recruited by Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), the hot husband of novelist Verity Crawford (Hathaway), to ghostwrite the final book in her popular series from their secluded (and palatial) house in the woods. You see, Verity suffered a recent accident that’s not only left her wheelchair-bound, but also unable to talk or move a muscle.
Once Lowen finds a manuscript stashed away by Verity, however, she realizes her idol may be far more sinister than she seems. While Showalter took a number of liberties with Hoover’s source material, including eliminating one of the dead children — a move Hoover, who consulted on the film, called “the best change we could have made” — he’s kept the book’s ending largely intact, though he almost didn’t. Verity’s manuscript reveals that she was resentful of her two children — and how they’d pulled Jeremy’s attention away from her — from the moment they’d entered the world.
One day, she took their son and daughter out on the lake in a kayak and, knowing the children couldn’t swim, capsized it on purpose, killing their daughter (the son miraculously survived). Lowen grows to hate Verity and feel deep sympathy for Jeremy after consuming their memoir, eventually fucking and falling for him. She’s been faking being paralyzed and mute the whole time!
Once Lowen and Jeremy discover this, he chokes her to death at Lowen’s behest and they dump her body in the lake. The action jumps six months into the future. As Lowen (now pregnant) and Jeremy are packing up the Crawford home, she finds a letter tucked under the floorboards claiming that the manuscript was merely a writing exercise where Verity was envisioning the darkest version of herself, and that after finding the manuscript, Jeremy attempted to kill her.
Consumed by guilt, Verity acted paralyzed as penance, and to remain close to Jeremy and their remaining child. But that wasn’t the ending that Showalter and his team originally intended. One thing’s for sure: Verity was a master manipulator.’ And then she puts on a pair of sunglasses, leans back, and has this very cat-with-a-mouse-in-its-mouth look, puts her hand out the window, and as they’re driving away and a song is playing, she’s making [waves through the air] with her hand.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
