Verity, ★★★
I’ll say this for Verity, the latest film adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel (after It Ends With Us, Regretting You and Reminders of Him): it lays its cards on the table, right from the title.
Verity means truth (from the Latin veritas). It also happens to be the name of a bestselling crime fiction author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), whose novels tap into her own thoughts and longings and anti-social impulses to such a degree that her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) stopped reading them after the first one, because he didn’t want his perception of the woman he loves to be tainted. Is the book version of her the truth, or the version he knows?
The story isn’t Verity’s, though; its narrator and central character is Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), also a novelist, but very much at the other end of the publishing mountain. We first meet her as she’s doing an apologetically hushed-voice reading in a sparsely attended book store, interrupted when one of the attendees gets a phone call. “Sorry,” the woman says. “Sorry,” responds the timorous Lowen.
She craves invisibility, she tells us in voiceover. And yet she’s also craving attention – and when a cyclist is killed as she’s about to cross the street, she gets it.
Her face and clothes covered in blood, she betrays no emotion. The man next to her asks if she’s OK, then lends her his shirt so she can get to an important business meeting. It’s Jeremy, in a coincidence that must make this a contender for most twisted meet-cute in cinematic history.
When she gets to the meeting, it’s Jeremy again (he arrives complete with fresh shirt). Turns out Verity is incapacitated and unable to complete her next novel, and her publisher wants to find someone who can mimic her style and complete it, as well as the two after that (if nothing else, the film is truthful about the mercenary priorities of the modern publishing industry).
A life-altering sum of money is offered, and next thing you know Lowen is ensconced in the House of Truth alongside Jeremy and the couple’s young son, Crew, digging through Verity’s notes as she tries to reconstruct her thought processes and narrative stylings.
When she finds a hidden thumb drive, though, everything changes. On it is a book Verity had written in secret, an autobiography titled So Be It. And it appears to reveal some very dark verities about Verity.
Director Michael Showalter, who created the often-hilarious Search Party, is no slouch at mixing dark humour and suspense, and he does a good job of keeping Verity on just the right side of ridiculous.
With Hathaway mostly immobile in her bed or chair, her face wan and stripped of make-up, her lips chapped, there’s an air of the haunted house about the beautiful lakeside residence where most of the action takes place. Verity is the Rebecca de Winter of this temple of sadness, but does Lowen have more in mind than aping her words? Does she want to steal her husband, her house, her life too?
Verity isn’t a great film, but it is a largely enjoyable one. And with its sense of what’s real and what’s not in constant flux, it might be the perfect tale for the post-truth age in which we live.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
