There is one thing all the films adapted from Colleen Hoover’s novels have in common: with the visual world they present and all the sexual tension they contain, they resemble Fifty Shades of Grey, but their stories never manage to be anything more than a soap opera. I don’t know, maybe Hoover’s books are actually more than that; I haven’t read them. But none of the Hoover adaptations I have watched have ever managed to go beyond this. In fact, there is a genuinely good story here, one that could have gone much further and even turned into a good psychological thriller. But somehow, they have found a way to screw it up once again. And don’t take the “somehow” too seriously, because the reason is actually quite obvious: Hoover is somehow cursed. Yes, I genuinely believe this. It is such a powerful curse that every novel this poor woman writes somehow ends up in the worst possible hands, and every single adaptation turns into a cursed potion made by throwing Fifty Shades of Grey, the Twilight series, and soap operas into the same cauldron.
Verity revolves around the question of whether a mother killed her own child. Famous writer Verity Crawford becomes bedridden and unable to speak after an accident that follows the death of one of her children. Lowen, who comes to the house to finish Verity’s unfinished books, finds a secret manuscript in Verity’s room in which she confesses to deliberately killing her daughter. Lowen believes it, falls in love with Jeremy, and eventually the two of them kill Verity. But then another letter appears, claiming that the manuscript was actually fiction and that Verity herself was the real victim. So, after all of this, the film leaves you with one simple question: Did Verity really kill her daughter, or did everyone simply believe her lies?
It is actually impossible not to think of Nocturnal Animals here. In that film, too, you are led to think that a text may be more than just the story it tells, that there might be another story underneath it, and perhaps another kind of reckoning. Verity has a story that could take the audience to exactly the same kind of place, one that could make people argue with each other even after the film ends: “Okay, but which one is actually true?” But the film has absolutely no interest in this provocative side of its own story. Instead, it seems to think that its painfully dull pacing is enough to create suspense and mystery, while its ridiculous sex scenes are supposed to convince you that the story is interesting and provocative. Verity seems not to believe in the story it is telling itself, because it completely lacks the realistic texture necessary to justify what its characters do, make us empathize with them, or actually pull us into their world.
Naturally, this also shows in the performances, giving Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway some of the worst performances of their careers. Actually, a part of me wants to say that Anne Hathaway isn’t even that bad. But the film pushes you so far out of its own atmosphere that even her sincere effort fails to make much of an impact. I won’t say anything about Dakota Johnson’s performance. After all, she seems to have become quite accustomed to blaming the films she appears in rather than herself whenever she gives a terrible performance, so instead of offering my own criticism, I would rather see what she has to say about herself—or rather, about the film.
