Over the last few years, Colleen Hoover has had a surprising amount of adaptations of her famous novels - one a year since 2024’s It Ends With Us, to be exact. However, this year has upped that number to two, with both Reminders of Him and Verity, an acceleration that I hope doesn’t continue. None of these have been received well critically or by audiences that weren’t already established, and since 2024 have had increasingly dwindling box office returns, bringing up the question: why does Colleen Hoover keep getting these rights? Well, Verity shows a new side of her work, in the thriller genre - rather than her regular twisted romance - though has that change done anything for the quality of these movies? No, not at all.
I’ll start off by saying, this is undoubtedly Anne Hathaway’s easiest paycheck of the year. She’s gone from mourning her husband in Ithaca, to fighting for her life in the suburbs surrounded by dinosaurs, to being awarded a well-earned break of lying down on camera for two hours. However, in a world of Jack Quaids and Lily-Rose Depps, Dakota Johnson continues to prove the meaning of the phrase “nepo baby” time and time again - with the extent of her prowess in Verity being reduced to cupping her hands over her mouth.
I believe at times, I enjoyed this ever so slightly more than Colleen Hoover’s other adaptations, partly due to it not being a twisted romance, this time. However, that’s not exactly golden praise, as the author seems intent on taking a sharp, whiplash-inducing, left turn in every single one of her stories that I’m really not fond of.
Much of this movie’s opening had absolutely no significance for the wider story in any way, all the way up until Lowen moves into the Crawford house. Not the bike crash, not Lowen’s story with her mother, especially not the opening scene of Verity’s interview that I’m sure you’ve already forgotten.
Until Lowen moves into the Crawford house, they drop many little stones that are never picked up at any point after that. Lowen essentially completely forgets about her mother’s death after ten minutes, even though it happened a week prior and she’d bring it up in every scenario beforehand. Lowen and Jeremy meeting prior to their official meeting had no significance, leaving the bike crash with the same importance. It seems this only existed within the story because it was in the book and for some sort of shock factor.
The only thing that actually seemed important in any way was Lowen’s book reading. We see here how her audience is increasingly dwindling and dissatisfied with her work, causing her work with Verity to be a natural step for a struggling author like herself.
Once Lowen actually did arrive at the Crawford house, nothing ever felt as if it moved at all. Essentially, Lowen reads Verity’s manuscript, they kill Verity, and we end by learning that maybe it was all more morally grey than we originally thought, with Lowen telling you exactly the questions to leave the cinema with - rather than allowing you to arrive at them yourself. Especially after watching Digger the same day, the absolute nothingness of Verity is accentuated tenfold.
I’d like to take a moment to speak on Verity’s story as a whole, as I think almost all of it - the little there actually was - was simply idiotic. They explain how Verity is able to feign paralysis by saying nothing’s really wrong with her spine, it's actually a brain malfunction of some sort - so why not do a brain scan? Then, when she’s killed, Lowen tells Jeremy not to strangle her as it’ll leave a bruise, but instead to cover her mouth and nose to make it look like an accident, leaving no trace. However, by then throwing Verity’s body into the lake, they negate any attempts for this to be attributed to any accident, she’d have no water in her lungs. This whole paragraph may be somewhat nitpicky, though it just shows a total lack of attention to detail in crafting this story.
I couldn’t help but feel as if Colleen Hoover crafted Verity as some sort of indulgent self-insert. A genius, always two steps ahead writer with a twisted mind, whose work is unmatched and nobody will even try because they know they can’t compare - this all feels like every egotistical author’s dream - and somewhat a vision of who they believe they are.
Just like all Colleen Hoover adaptations, there’s a big twist at the end which causes you to rethink the entire plot, though it happens so often that it loses all surprise - I’m numb to it all now. Not only could you tell that there was something wrong with Jeremy from the start - even if that may be attributed to Josh Hartnett’s proficiency in the moral grey - it's such a simple twist, though it’s packaged to you like something much grander. Parts of this twist are admittedly quite good, telling you that it was a mistake to view this all in the singular view of Lowen’s life, though it didn’t need to be explained to us in a Hot Ones interview right at the end, but the whole thing just feels incredibly lazy.
The entire twist can be singled down to: “just kidding”. This is such a boring way to divert this story, Verity isn’t somewhat morally grey, like she is in the novel, instead she’s just evil, then in one letter, we’re told she’s actually good. I would have seen the movie as a whole much more favourably if this was taken out completely. Yes, it would have been a much simpler, run of the mill good vs evil story, but is that really a bad thing? I like the idea of following who we believed was this mystical writer who became warped in our perception until we realise her evil doings. They didn’t need to then flip us back, but tell us that maybe we shouldn’t have been flipped back, leaving us with a mess of a conclusion.
Finally, while this may not have been the worst Colleen Hoover adaptation, it's really not far off. It has all the over-explaining and plotline forgetting that makes for a trudge to sit through, mixed with a story that’s either uneventful or incredibly rushed, with no in-between. Josh Hartnett was great, Anne Hathaway did what she could, and Dakota Johnson was as expected, there’s little more to it.