Verity (MA, 116 minutes)
⭐⭐⭐
In my late 20s, I found myself sadly in a coercive-control relationship, like something out of the pages of a Colleen Hoover novel.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
It was with Sydney, a city that underpaid me, drained me of my youth and yet I couldn't break away from, until one day the man standing in front of me at the crosswalk at Oxford and Hyde Park stepped out on a green signal and got flattened by a car that hadn't stopped for the red.
With a spot of blood on my cheek I took that near miss for a sign, walked into work and resigned and was on a bus back to Canberra that night, the spell over, like someone from the pages of a Colleen Hoover novel.
This novel in fact, because that's pretty much what happens to Dakota Johnson's character on her way to a job interview at the beginning of Verity, the latest of many recent Hoover novel adaptations for the big screen.
Because that opening scene felt so visceral and personal to my own experience, I was immediately hooked on this drama, was amped for it to be a "big scare" horror, when in fact, the horror here is far more subtle, perhaps a little too subtle for many viewers.
Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is an emerging writer, published but with next to no following or sales, and with mounting debts left behind by her recently deceased mother.
And so when Lowen receives a wildly generous offer from her publisher to help ghostwrite the latest novel from one of their bigger crime authors Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), she's not entirely in a position to turn the money down.
But an enticement to accept the job is Verity's handsome husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and intrigued, Lowen moves into the Crawford house in upstate New York to immerse herself in Crawford's work and get a feel for her story and her voice.
It is here she actually meets Verity - the author has been catatonic after her own car accident and, with big publishing money on the line, the family and publisher have conspired to keep Verity's condition a secret for long enough to push out the final trilogy of books in her bestselling series.
In Verity's study, Lowen discovers a secret manuscript, an autobiography, that paints Verity as a dark figure indeed.
The marketing for this film has been wonderful, selling it as either high camp, in the spirit of the 1960s soap Dark Shadows, Italian Giallo-style horror like Suspiria, or a slick Hitchcockian thriller.
Actually, the horror might be more akin to Stephen King's Misery, with an author unable to escape their own constructs, and as both producer and actor Anne Hathaway is the real scream queen of this feature, and understands the smaller and more unglamorous role is the meatier one.
There's a fascinating set of layering to how this film will be read by audiences, informed by two years of media maelstrom from the Lively-Baldoni court case of another Hoover novel film adaptation, even though this production predates that sad story, and there'll be plenty who see Hathaway's Verity as trapped as Hoover was by that debacle.
Horror should be epigenetic for actor Dakota Johnson, with her grandmother being Tippi Hedren of Hitchcock's The Birds, and though she has a wry and reserved delivery that makes it hard to engage, she is mirroring Hoover's intent, deliberately designed to be reinterpreted, and coming with its own baggage for those who first met Johnson in the Fifty Shades of Grey films.
The film's production is gorgeous, if a little dark, which is I'm sure intentional, but is also because the film is shot in a real-life piece of exceptional architecture, the 1961-designed Nierenberg House which is almost its own character.
