In this hackneyed psychological thriller, a struggling writer (Dakota Johnson) is contracted to complete the latest novel by a reclusive bestselling author (Anne Hathaway) following her mysterious accident. But when she moves in, and gets sidetracked into researching her employer’s difficult family life, she finds far more than she bargained for.
Immediately, Dakota Johnson’s characteristically lackadaisical narration spells out the film’s themes of identity, secrecy and grief as she walks through the anonymous concrete canyons of New York, headphones on, as if listening to her own autobiography. But soon she’s spirited away by Josh Hartnett, in the thankless role of the author’s conflicted husband, to her new assignment.
Nick Antosca’s script has a persistent bluntness to it, both in its introduction of the plot’s numerous (and mostly predictable) twists and turns, and in its clumsy expository dialogue. We get to know the three main characters quickly, as they drop such heavy hints about what’s to come that one worries they might break their toes. It’s as though the writer is just itching to get to the juicy stuff.
The setting has a chilly kind of eroticism. It’s a remote, wintry, almost fairytale forest populated by snow-dusted trees, its thirst slaked by cold rain slowly filling the nearby lake with endless drops of intrigue. The house itself is a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque monstrosity, a row of teeth sticking out of the earth, ready to bite something.
The humble tools of a writer’s trade – paper clips, USB sticks etc – are fetishised into something threatening, literalising the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword. The actual sex scenes mostly keep their underwear on, but in leaving the horny details to our imaginations, they put us right there with Johnson as she creeps around the house investigating things that go hump in the night.
Staccato strings scratch the soundtrack to shreds, their urgency a nod to emotionally stilted costume drama; but then an ugly pitch-shifting vibrato will corrupt them into something horrible to ensure we get the point. It’s not quite the shower scene in Psycho, but it’s standing outside the bathroom door with its hand over its mouth (and possibly its other hand over something else).
Director Michael Showalter has come up with some imaginative ways to communicate Johnson’s creative process, besides the usual tricks of voiceover or optical composites of typed text sailing across the screen while our heroine sits un-cinematically on a sofa, reading. With devious editing and super-slow dissolves, he entwines the two women’s lives with fragments of flashback to when the author was in her pomp, or with imagined interactions that blur the line between reality and fantasy.
Anne Hathaway is perfectly cast as the celebrity writer whose stories are so dark and twisted that you can’t help wondering if she’s following the old adage about ‘writing what you know’. Even as a wheelchair-bound catatonic, her inability to work has reduced her to a Hitchcockian lump of ambiguous, passive malice (and she’s not the only one).
For long periods we see and hear her only in glimpses, in vintage TV interviews or on the audio book where her silky, sonorous voice weaves tales of violence with the relish of her erstwhile take on Catwoman. Frankly, Hathaway’s quietly diabolical performance is far better than this hokum deserves.
Verity is a flawed, formulaic thriller that relies too heavily on its capable cast and its undemanding visual gloss to work the audience up into a fearful lather. It’s at its best on the rare occasions when its viciousness flirts with camp, and while its seductive blend of sex and violence might appeal to a younger generation starved of such things, the rest of us have drooled over it all before.
-Stew Mott-
