Three Stars, One Messy Thriller, Zero Apologies
The reviews for Verity have landed on opposite ends of the spectrum. Some critics are calling it a “campy, faithful adaptation” of Colleen Hoover’s novel. Others are calling it “a criminal waste” of Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett. What almost nobody is saying is that the film is boring – and that distinction matters more than it might seem.
The movie casts Hathaway as Verity Crawford, a celebrated author whose life is wrapped in carefully kept secrets. Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to ghostwrite for Verity, who moves into a remote estate and ends up in uncomfortably close quarters with Verity’s husband, Jeremy, played by Hartnett. When FashionDailyMag’s Victoria Montalti sat down with the three leads, the conversation made one thing clear: whatever is happening on screen, the people behind it are completely in on the joke.
The Kind of Chemistry That Doesn’t Need a Script
Johnson, Hathaway, and Hartnett arrived to the interview carrying the same loose, slightly chaotic energy that has made their press tour so watchable. They traded jokes. They teased each other. They talked about obsession, secrets, and murder with the ease of people discussing weekend plans. The rapport between them reads less like three actors promoting a film and more like three people who genuinely enjoyed the work – which, depending on the film, is rarer than it sounds.
Their press tour has already generated its share of meme-worthy moments, which the trio seems entirely unbothered by – perhaps even encouraged by. From discussions about zodiac signs to dissecting their characters’ more questionable decision-making, Hathaway, Johnson, and Hartnett have shown no interest in playing it straight. The absurdity is the point, and they know it.
Hartnett spoke to something that explains why the film works for the people it works for. “I was always playing the hero,” he said, “and I think it’s so much fun to be able to play characters that the more you get into them, the deeper and darker they get.” That kind of willingness to sit in moral ambiguity – without flinching, without softening it with a redemptive arc – is exactly what Colleen Hoover’s source material demands. Hartnett’s Jeremy is not a hero. And Hartnett seems genuinely relieved about that.
What Camp Actually Requires
Camp in film is frequently misunderstood as carelessness – as if leaning into the absurd requires less from an actor rather than more. Verity makes the case that it actually demands a very specific kind of control. Hathaway’s Verity Crawford is not a character who winks at the audience. She is played straight, which is precisely what makes her terrifying and, at moments, genuinely funny. The comedy is a byproduct of total commitment, not a departure from it.
Johnson’s Lowen operates as the audience’s entry point into the Crawford estate’s increasingly strange atmosphere – the character who keeps asking the reasonable questions while making deeply unreasonable choices. That tension is where most of the film’s energy lives. A struggling writer, a remote estate, a mysterious husband: the architecture of the story is deliberately familiar, borrowed from a genre with very specific rules. Hoover’s novel broke those rules often enough to earn a dedicated readership. Whether the film does the same is where critics and audiences are currently disagreeing.
The Discourse, and What to Do With It
Mixed reviews for a film like this are not a death sentence. They are, in some cases, a form of cultural oxygen. The gap between “campy, faithful adaptation” and “criminal waste” tells you less about the film’s quality and more about what different viewers believe a prestige thriller is allowed to be. Verity is based on a Colleen Hoover novel. Colleen Hoover’s readership is enormous and deeply invested. The film was never going to arrive quietly.
What’s interesting is that the cast’s off-screen behavior during the press tour has operated almost as a second film running parallel to the first. The meme-worthy moments, the easy banter, the willingness to engage with the silliness of the whole enterprise – it reframes the viewing experience before the audience even walks into the theater. Knowing that Hathaway, Johnson, and Hartnett treated the absurdity as a feature rather than a flaw changes the way the film reads.
Hartnett’s comment about dark characters lands differently in that context. Playing the hero, over and over, is its own kind of constraint. Jeremy Crawford allows him something that clean heroism does not: the freedom to be genuinely unsettling. Whether audiences decide that’s worth the price of a ticket depends largely on their tolerance for a thriller that refuses to resolve neatly.
The more relevant question might not be whether Verity is good or bad, but whether “good” and “bad” are the right categories for a film that is so openly committed to being exactly what it is – and whether three of the most watchable actors working today are enough to make that commitment feel like enough.
