The thermostat in the Crawford house is always set a few degrees too warm, and that is hardly the most uncomfortable thing about it. Michael Showalter's Verity, which landed on streaming this week after a brief theatrical window that began September 30, opens with a struggling writer named Lowen Ashleigh walking into that Vermont mansion and immediately sensing she has made a mistake. She hasn't yet met Verity. She hasn't yet read a page of the manuscript she's been hired to finish. She just knows that something in the air is off, and Showalter, working from a screenplay adapted from Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel, spends the next 114 minutes proving her right in increasingly nasty ways.
The premise is a familiar one for anyone who has wandered through the thriller section of an airport bookstore: a ghostwriter is summoned to complete the work of an incapacitated celebrity author, only to discover that the person she's impersonating has left behind more than unfinished chapters. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen with a jittery, watchful quality that suits a woman who has spent her whole career disappearing into other people's sentences. She needs the money. She needs the job. And she needs to believe that Jeremy Crawford, played by Josh Hartnett with a warm smile that never quite reaches his eyes, is the grieving husband he appears to be rather than something considerably worse.
Then there's Anne Hathaway, and the film belongs to her the moment she appears. Verity Crawford is bedridden, unresponsive, eyes open but empty, after a car accident that has left her unable to speak or move. Or so everyone says. Hathaway, an actress who has always been most interesting when she's allowed to be a little dangerous, plays the role with a stillness that curdles into menace. It's a performance built on the flicker of an eyelid, the slight shift of a pupil, the suggestion that the woman in the bed is cataloguing every word spoken in that room and filing it away for later.
Later, of course, comes. Lowen discovers Verity's unpublished autobiography, a document so venomous and so specific in its cruelties that it changes the shape of everything she thought she understood about the household. Is it real? Is it a novel? Is it a confession? Showalter, whose background is in comedy, proves unexpectedly adept at this kind of slow-burn dread. He understands that the scariest thing in a house isn't a jump scare but a closed door, and he fills the frame with them.
The supporting cast is sturdy. Brady Wagner, as the Crawfords' young son Crew, avoids the precocious-child trap and plays his scenes with a genuinely unsettling vagueness. Ismael Cruz Cordova appears as Corey, a local who knows more than he lets on, and Irina Dvorovenko brings a brittle elegance to Anna, whose role in the family's history proves more tangled than Lowen first assumes. Sienna Kulovitz and K.K. Moggie round out the ensemble in smaller but not insignificant parts.
What holds the film back from being more than a very good weekend watch is its fidelity to the source material. Hoover's novel is a page-turner, and the adaptation preserves the twists with a reverence that occasionally smothers the suspense. A few of the reveals land with less force than they should because the film has telegraphed them too early, and the final act, which should feel like a trap snapping shut, instead feels a bit like a door being politely closed. The TMDb rating, currently sitting at 6.889 out of 10, suggests audiences are divided in exactly this way: appreciative of the performances, less certain about the machinery around them.
Still, there is real pleasure in watching Hathaway and Johnson circle each other. One is playing dead and the other is playing dumb, and both are lying. The Crawford house, with its overheated rooms and its endless supply of manuscripts, becomes a character in its own right, a place where stories are currency and everyone is writing a version of events that suits them. Lowen's job is to finish Verity's books. What she ends up finishing is something closer to an investigation, and the film's best sequences are the ones in which she reads, and reads, and realizes that the woman in the bed upstairs has been telling the truth all along, just not in any form anyone wanted to hear.
Verity is now streaming. It runs 114 minutes, and it will make you want to check the locks.
