After a truly stacked 2026, Anne Hathaway’s fifth and final movie of the year is finally in cinemas.
In her latest film, Verity, the Oscar winner shares the screen with Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett in a big-screen adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel of the same name.
The erotic thriller centres around a successful and popular author who is unable to finish her best-selling book series after an accident, so her husband brings another writer into her life to do it.
However, along the way, this writer becomes sucked into Verity’s world, and after making a series of startling discoveries, begins to wonder whether everything in her life is as it seems.
Reviews for Verity have not exactly been glowing, with an average critical score of 41% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing.
It should be noted, though, that some critics have said that those who love a classic erotic thriller will probably still have a good time with Verity, even if it isn’t the most high-brow of films.
Here’s what critics are saying about Verity…
“After a sensational opening sequence, the film gradually unwinds, and the entirety of the third act disintegrates into a shower of small substandard plot points that don’t convince.
“The narrative structure seems to rest on Lowen [Dakota’s character] finding not one but two manuscripts, and we are finally asked to accept a lamely unresolved situation as something fascinatingly ambiguous. This needed a new draft.”
“It’s a solid enough melodrama elevated by overqualified leading ladies, but the twists and turns don’t justify the lengthy running time.”
“Like Verity’s writing, the film simply bandies about a handful of clichés without giving them any original spin. It’s an airport novel you’d leave on the plane, an in-flight movie you’ll likely doze off to someday, borne aloft toward somewhere I hope is far more interesting than what’s wanly flickering in front of you.”
“Nobody can bring much intrigue to this ludicrous story of writers, ghost writers and soon-to-be-ghost writers, which labels and boldfaces its supposed ambiguities at every turn: not Johnson, not Josh Hartnett, and not the lately unavoidable Anne Hathaway, frozen in a role that demands little of her but glassy hauteur.”
“Has this languorous semi-erotic thriller about a bloody love triangle between a world-famous author (Hathaway), her kept husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and an ambitious ghostwriter (Dakota Johnson) been worth the wait? Absolutely not, no – though this is largely due to a climactic twist so woolly and self-defeating, it had me gnawing my armrest in frustration.
“But until that point, there is some seedy, slinky fun to be had, all capably styled by director Michael Showalter with a lurid Brian De Palma-like sheen.”
“Everyone loves a trashy ‘guilty pleasure’ movie – Anne Hathaway seemingly more than most. The Les Misérables Oscar winner has been banging them out at a fearsome rate, from the ‘cougar romance’ The Idea Of You and the musical psychodrama Mother Mary to the bubblegum sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2 and the dizzy dinosaur romp The End Of Oak Street.
“She has, alas, badly misfired with this latest effort, a chintzy Colleen Hoover adaptation that’s all trash and very little, if any guilty pleasure.”
“Did director Michael Showalter just nail the Colleen Hoover adaptation? The third major movie version of the blockbuster author’s work hits the big screen with Verity and things are starting to lock into place. Much darker and more twisty than the weepy trauma dumps It Ends With Us or Reminders Of Him, Verity is high camp with a wink, a hair toss and just enough bite to draw blood.”
“The various inevitable twists, though predictable, finally woke me up enough to give this thing a pass largely because Hathaway and Johnson are both magnetic performers and make it watchable – particularly Johnson who carries the largest load here.”
“It’s wickedly playful, and it gives its central performers plenty of chances to show off their technique and build their movie-star personas. Hathaway has fun toying with public perceptions of her as a wannabe Great Actress who’s determined to out-Streep Meryl even if it means accepting roles defined mainly by a physical challenge (here, it’s finding a way to communicate with other characters and the audience without being able to move or speak).
“At the same time, Hathaway weaponises the collective impression of her (less common now than it was a decade ago) as a person who must secretly be evil, because no one person could possibly be that gifted, beautiful, hardworking, accomplished, and nice. She’s ideally cast in a tale that asks if a woman named Verity is too good to be true.”
“Half – or maybe even most – of the fun in Verity comes from sharing Lowen’s perspective as she’s seduced towards drastic measures while staying with the Crawfords for research.
“[Michael] Showalter isn’t particularly convincing as a horror craftsman […] and Verity is more silly than scary whenever its dark strings give way to the sudden jolt of seeing Hathaway standing up or whatever (surely, Lowen must be seeing things), but the director does a patient job of watching the ice thaw between the ghostwriter and her broad-shouldered host.”
“While I wouldn’t call Verity a happy story, my audience was more inclined to chortle than shudder at lines like, ‘Im going to steal your husband’ being whispered over the edge of a hospital bed.
“So I won’t say that the whole exercise leaves you feeling particularly good about anything you just watched, but you’ll definitely get more laughs than any outwardly self-styled comedy releasing in theaters this weekend.”
“Ultimately, Verity is barely a movie; it’s a series of montages in which beautiful people whisper at each other, have extremely passionate sex, commit murder, and snarl menacingly while Dakota Johnson reads aloud from a manuscript that might as well be called The Exposition.”
