“Verity” wishes it was a twisty thriller. It is indeed twisty, but it doesn’t have the heart to be a thriller. The film’s advertising is clearly positioning it as a successor to last year’s hit front-of-the-bookstore novel adaptation “The Housemaid,” though it is based on a book that predates that film’s source material by four years. In fact, it is based on a novel by the popular Colleen Hoover, and it’s easy to picture the studio jumping at the chance to release a movie with Hoover’s name crossed with a setup similar to “The Housemaid.” The problem is that with Hoover’s name comes her trademark sappy style, which is ill-suited to the thriller genre, at least here.
Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling, unpopular, highbrow author. She meets a man named Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) through a shared traumatic experience and within five minutes he’s locking them both in a men’s room together. He eventually reveals that he’s the husband of revenge-thriller author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who is in desperate need of a ghostwriter. He offers Lowen money that she can’t turn down, and soon she finds herself moving into the Crawfords’ house in rural Vermont, where…
