Anne Hathaway deserves more credit for her capabilities as a camp queen.
Yes, yes, she’s popular and respected for her work in mainstream movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 and masterful cinema like The Odyssey. But for my money, Hathaway’s filmography is at its most exciting when she plunges into anti-heroine depths, playing women who aren’t just messy, but menacing and even deadly.
For your consideration, remember Colossal, where she played a drunkard who manifests a kaiju over Seoul, or Serenity, an under-sung psycho-sexual thriller where she sunk her pearly white teeth into the role of femme fatale. Look to Eileen, where she played a psychologist on a twisted mission, or NEON’s scuttled Mother’s Instinct, where she snarled as a picture-perfect mother destroyed by the death of her child.
Even earlier this year, Hathaway offered a diva-level performance as a haunted pop star in Mother Mary, which is not to be overlooked. But unexpectedly, it’s in the very mainstream adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel Verity that Hathaway gives her wildest performance of 2026. (Yes, even considering the dinos-on-the-loose The End of Oak Street.)
In Verity, Hathaway plays the title character, massively popular novelist Verity Crawford, who is known for her Noble Virtues series, each told from the point of view of a bloodthirsty villain. Tailored dresses and cashmere cardigans the color of fresh blood make Hathaway’s pale skin look luminescent and hard like marble. She’s regal and ruthless as a villainess that is not just fun to watch, but scratching at the heights of iconic psycho-biddy stars like Shelley Winters, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford.
And let’s consider this a good opportunity to remind you, dear reader, that Who Slew Auntie Roo? and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? are sensational selects for spooky season. But should Verity join their ranks?
Sadly, no. But Hathaway is innocent on that charge.
Verity is a psycho-sexual thriller for the faint-hearted.
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Screenwriter Nick Antosca (Brand New Cherry Flavor) adapts Hoover’s Verity into a color-by-numbers psycho-sexual thriller. Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, an impoverished writer whose books have been published but widely ignored. So, when she gets the chance to ghostwrite the final novels of Verity’s best-selling book series, the steady work and fat paycheck might be tempting. However, more tempting is the potential to get closer to Verity’s husband, the dashing Jeremy (Trap‘s Josh Hartnett).
But there’s an odd catch to this contract. Lowen must stay in Verity’s remote cabin and work out of the author’s personal office. Why? Well, Jeremy gently explains, Verity was in a horrid car crash that left her unable to walk or talk. A shadow of her former self, she is wheeled around her home, where her young son frolics and her husband looks forlorn. And soon, Lowen lurks about, stumbling onto a shocking memoir that says Verity has more in common with her fictional villains than anyone could imagine.
Naturally, Lowen becomes obsessed, not only with Verity and her secrets but also with her life and family. The younger woman fantasizes not only about straddling Jeremy — while wearing a silk robe embroidered with the initials VC — but also making out with Verity herself. Between such torrid thoughts and flashbacks to the early days of the Crawfords’ romance, Verity is studded with sex scenes. However, director Michael Showalter shows no passion for them.
Known for helming comedies like The Big Sick and the Hathaway-fronted The Idea of You, he seems out of his depth in creating titillating love scenes. There’s a woeful lack of foreplay. Despite an R rating, Verity bears only bum and a bit of tit. And overall, these scenes are too short to satisfy, and awash with cliched close-ups of a woman’s open, groaning mouth, to feel properly enthralling. Beyond the tawdry thrill of such scenes, the desire portrayed in Verity is supposed to be so intense that it drives Lowen off her professional ambitions, down a dark path of suspicion and temptation. Without properly sexy scenes, this character turn just doesn’t work. But Johnson is part of the problem there.
Dakota Johnson gives us nothing in Verity.
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Because Lowen meets Verity after the car crash, much of Hathaway’s screentime is a performance of the author as Lowen imagines her. A heightened vision of femininity and ferocity, she is gorgeous, with a wicked wit, a terrifyingly mercurial nature, and a killer smile lined with a bold red lip.
Hathaway plays the role with clear relish, her brown eyes flashing from a hardened glare to a beguiling gaze in an instant. Her lips sliding from a smile to a snarl with an electric ferality. But best of all, she works in some quirks of speech that evoke the Transatlantic accent favored by Golden Age Hollywood stars and quirkily reimagined for comedy by Catherine O’Hara‘s Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek. Listen for the way Hathaway says “Boston,” as if it’s a four-letter word she’s never deigned to say aloud before. In such moments, Hathaway is keenly hilarious, and she knows it.
Johnson, on the other hand, comes off as bored. Yes, in the book (and the movie), Lowen describes herself as having “Resting Bored Face.” But even in fantasy sequences of torrid sex, Lowen practically sleepwalks. This character is meant to be our bewildered guide into a world of mixed messages and manipulation. But in Johnson’s hands, Lowen is low-key annoyed, whether her character is playing with Verity’s young son, seducing her husband, or reading her scandalous writings. And Johnson has no chemistry with Hartnett or Hathaway, making the love triangle element fall flat.
There are points where I wondered if Johnson’s flatness was intentional. Leaning into the trashy novel of it all, Showalter might have urged her toward stiffness to create a campy comedic disconnect which would then be bolstered by the comically bad dialogue. For instance, in an early scene where a meet-not-so-cute leaves Lowen covered in a stranger’s blood, she flirts haphazardly with Jeremy, who says he’s seen worse. While Lowen inexplicably fails to wash off a swath of blood from her neck, she asks if he’s a doctor. And in response, Hartnett, with an outrageous deadpan, says, “I’m in real estate.” It’s funny! Is it supposed to be? I’m not sure. I’m even less sure that his follow-up comment (“I pulled my daughter’s body out of a lake.”) was meant to be funny, but it was so incredibly awkward that it got laughs!
Where Hathaway plunges deep into the sultry, salty waters of psycho-sexual thriller with her psycho-biddy eccentricity as a tool, Johnson seems rudderless. Or perhaps, 11 years after she broke through as the star of Fifty Shades of Grey, she resents being back in the place of sex-starved ingenue. Overall, her effect makes the movie feel like a chore instead of a cheap thrill.
Verity is trashy fun, but falls short of being good.
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Those who reveled over The Housemaid or A Simple Favor will likely enjoy Verity. Though Showalter’s offering lacks the liveliness and transgressive edge of Paul Feig’s thrillers, it’s erratically entertaining. However, it’s hard to ignore that Verity could have been more. We’re still living in the seismic aftermath of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian mini-series that turned hockey smut into a critically heralded and fan-worshipped sensation. Show creator Jacob Tierney not only brought author Rachel Reid‘s characters to life with unapologetically explicit sex scenes, but also used the intimacy of these scenes to expose a hidden side to the characters, who wore masks for their public personas.
Then, even this summer, movie audiences were gifted with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Inspired by a slew of slasher movies, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun explored a story similar to Verity. A young writer on assignment to revive a popular franchise finds her life dramatically changed as she becomes obsessed with an older woman, central to that franchise. While both films are rated R, only Camp Miasma doesn’t hold back when it comes to sex and violence. Schoenbrun went to unhinged extremes, including decapitations that create blood geysers out of human necks. And then, her vision of satisfying sex didn’t glamorize it as the zipperless fuck of author Erica Jong, but embraced the mess of fluids and emotions (and gummy candies).
Verity is nowhere near as bold as any of the movies I’ve mentioned here. It’s sort of weird, sort of sexy, and sort of funny. But ultimately, it feels criminally constrained by mainstream prudishness. Which means that as the credits roll on Verity, I was left teased but unsatisfied, wishing for the movie on the level of Hathaway’s performance.
Verity opens in theaters on Oct. 2.