Verity is in theaters now.
In a Guardian piece on how Colleen Hoover became a global best-selling author, one YA fan suggested it was because she’s “writing for people who don’t like reading.” If that's the case, then one could argue that the film adaptations of her work are for people who don't like cinema. Now that all four films inspired by her literary prose—2024's It Ends with Us, 2025's Regretting You, 2026's Reminders of Him, and Verity—have been released, the case can be made. These are not adaptations that elevate the middling narratives of Hoover's novels; this was apparent when reading It Ends with Us after suffering through the movie, a realization that led to a vow to avoid her books.
With Verity, there was hope it might buck the trend. Divorced from the sentimentality of previous adaptations, the story opens with a meet-cute that delivers whiplash. After introducing best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) through interviews with figures like Gayle King, discussing the darkness in her writing, struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) enters the narrative. Lowen's agent has secured her a meeting with Crawford's publishing house for a mysterious job opportunity. En route, she witnesses a road accident and is drenched in the blood of the cyclist involved. It's an opener as out there as the one in Meet Joe Black, but it provides an opportunity for Josh Hartnett's handsome stranger to help clean her up.
In typical Hoover fashion, the pair trauma bond. He reveals he dragged his dead daughter out of a lake, and she mentions her mother died of cancer the week prior. There is no build-up, just awkward exposition-dumping in a men's restroom. They are soon reunited at the publishing house, where it is revealed he is Verity's husband, Jeremy. He and the editors want to commission Lowen to finish Verity's novel series; Verity is in a comatose state after a car accident and cannot speak or move. With little deliberation and due to the shoehorned fact that Lowen is also being evicted from her New York apartment, she packs up and moves into the Crawfords' sprawling Vermont home for six months.
There she meets Verity, a shell of her glamorous self with a glazed stare. This is one of the few scenes the women share; most of Hathaway's performance is confined to interviews on shows like Hot Ones and the Call Her Daddy podcast, as well as flashbacks layered with sultry voiceovers as Lowen reads Verity's secret autobiography. Every time she picks it up, sentences run across the screen, and Lowen is often superimposed over scenes from the past to try to enliven the act of reading, but it does not succeed.
What is most infuriating is how long it takes Lowen to finish the text. It is unbelievable that an author would constantly run away from the autobiography to masturbate and go on a date with Jeremy, given Verity's unflinching candor. She reveals juicy details about her marriage and hints that their daughter's death might not have been an accident—how did she not finish it in one sitting? Nothing screams “padding for time” more than this tedious set-up, accomplishing little in the way of ingratiating the viewer with Johnson's "pick me" girl protagonist.
Nor does it scratch the surface of who Jeremy actually is beyond the one-dimensional trope of a swoon-worthy husband. Screenwriter Nick Antosca, who recently impressed with his adaptation of Cape Fear, hints at some resentment on Jeremy’s part for his wife's success, but the script never probes deeper than in a final act reveal that flings the missing pieces at you in one blink. The best Antosca offers is an examination of the reliability of the narrator, but even that effort is phoned in. Michael Showalter's direction is similarly dull, conveying little of the vision seen in his Oscar-nominated films, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and The Big Sick. Instead, it plods an uneven, uninspiring route into cliché and lazy convention.
That Anne Hathaway has been on an exquisite run of big screen releases from The Odyssey and Mother Mary to The End of Oak Street and The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes this, her last 2026 performance, even more disappointing. What a lead balloon for everyone involved—one that proves a moratorium on Colleen Hoover adaptations is long overdue. To misquote Lady Catherine from Pride and Prejudice: "Are the shades of cinema to be thus polluted?"
Verdict Another abysmal adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel, Michael Showalter's Verity is a vapid psychosexual drama with bumpy pacing, an eye-rolling plot, and paper-thin characters that not even Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, or Josh Hartnett can invigorate. It’s a woeful endeavor that will have you laughing with derision throughout.