Verity

Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a relatively unknown fiction writer hired by Josh Hartnett's Jeremy Crawford to ghostwrite novels for his wife, the titular bestselling author Verity, played by Anne Hathaway. Verity has had a debilitating accident that turns out to be more serious than Lowen assumed when she took the job and agreed to live with Jeremy and his family. Slowly, Lowen uncovers disturbing truths as she researches and prepares to write the book on her own.

In adapting Colleen Hoover's novel, Director Michael Showalter (Hello, My Name Is Doris, The Big Sick, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and screenwriter Nick Antosca (creator and showrunner of the Apple TV miniseries adaptation of Cape Fear) aim for Leave Her to Heaven but end up with What Lies Beneath. Verity is one of those psychological thrillers that's so ridiculous it engenders laughs rather than scares. Not one aspect of the plot stands up to even the slightest scrutiny. And, despite the A-list cast, this isn't one of those movies where you don't ask the logic questions until the drive home. Not one choice these characters make follows any logic, and their behavior is driven by the needs of the narrative, not the characters.

This is a movie where, early in the picture, the main character discovers the secret journal of the woman whom she's been hired to impersonate, and whose home she's living in, and whose husband she's falling for. It's a slim stack of printed pages that she carries around and hides from the husband. It looks like the kind of manuscript even a dyslexic like me could read in about 75 minutes. Yet this movie requires us to believe that she reads these pages over the course of several weeks (many, even months; there are some season changes in this movie). Of course, this only happens because the filmmakers want the audience to learn about the mystery characters at the same speed as the protagonist. But by not devising a credible reason for why or how Lowen would only read a few pages at a time, they undercut all her credibility, and we just think she's an idiot—not something you wanna do to your hero, guys.

Still, this is a somewhat fun dumb movie. Even though it only has about six characters, it's not predictable. Of course, it only keeps you guessing because nothing about it makes any sense, and characters that could prevent certain things from being revealed conveniently disappear right around the time when their presence would discredit one of the big reveals. Very silly stuff.