Movie review: 'Verity' cracks the code of adapting Colleen Hoover's work

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 screenplay is adapted by Nick Antosca is remarkably faithful to the book, just condensed for efficiency. The film opens with a graphic car accident involving a struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson). When a stranger comes to her aid, one man’s death becomes another couple’s portentous meet-cute, as Lowen encounters Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) for the first time.

The pair are about to find themselves in a complex psychosexual throuple with Jeremy’s wife, Verity (Anne Hathaway), a megasuccessful novelist and genuine celebrity. Verity can’t finish her book series for mysterious reasons, so Jeremy hires Lowen to do so. When she arrives at their imposing Vermont mansion to go through Verity’s notes, Lowen discovers that Verity’s a vegetable, completely physically and mentally indisposed after a car accident. Still, she looms large in Lowen’s imagination, especially when she finds a secret autobiography in which Verity reveals her darkest secrets.

The guileless Lowen gobbles it up, spinning an elaborate fantasy about the woman Verity was before the accident. In Lowen’s overactive imagination, Hathaway plays a Hitchcockian femme fatale always wearing her signature color, red. This juicy role as a female psychopath-bad mommy-sex kitten-genius is almost too easy for the Oscar winner.

Showalter has assembled the perfect trio of prestige actors for the material, because all three have a knowingness about the way they play the duality of their characters. Hathaway is arch and expressive, doing subtle things with her eyes and voice that no one else can. Her more "actressy" qualities juxtapose Johnson’s dry, sardonic demeanor, which she alternates with whispery seduction. Hartnett plays the hapless man well, but his naive exterior could be concealing something more sinister.

Of the Colleen Hoover adaptations so far, "Verity" is easily the best and most stylish of them all. It plays with more sophisticated themes of writing, truth and trust, the complicated nature of the versions of ourselves we put on the page. The unmoored truth is never resolved here, leaving us with the lesson that the only thing certain is uncertainty, and the only person we can’t trust is ourselves. Verity? Hardly.