Verity

Verity (2026) is an erotic psychological thriller directed by Michael Showalter. Nick Antosca wrote the screenplay, which adapts Colleen Hoover's 2018 novel. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer who is broke, grieving and facing eviction. After a chance encounter with Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), she is hired to finish the bestselling book series of his wife, Verity (Anne Hathaway). Verity is a famous author who is incapacitated after a car accident.

Lowen moves into the Crawford house to go through Verity's notes. She finds a hidden manuscript that reads as a confessional account of the marriage rather than a novel. As she reads it, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur. Her attraction to Jeremy grows, and she becomes unsure what is true.

The film mixes gothic domestic suspense, a love triangle and a story about authorship. It is a Hitchcock-style puzzle about who is telling the truth. It runs 117 minutes and was released by Amazon MGM Studios in October 2026.

The film is about the unreliability of narrative and the way people pick the story they need. Lowen has to choose between two competing accounts of Verity: the manuscript and a later letter. Her choice depends less on evidence than on what lets her keep the life she now wants. The film declines to settle the question. Showalter and Hoover have described that ambiguity as the whole idea. Verity ends on the title character and a remark about certainty, so the final image is about how certainty is manufactured. Anyone who tells a story, and anyone who believes one, is shaping the truth.

The main dispute is over Verity. In one reading she is a sociopathic manipulator who drowned her own child and then faked her condition. In the other she is a tragic victim of a manuscript and a letter whose authorship cannot be verified, and Lowen and Jeremy are the real predators. Both readings are supported by the film. Another reading treats the film as camp or satire of erotic thrillers and of grief-counseling language. A third takes Lowen as the real villain, a woman who reads herself into another woman's life. Showalter has said the team explored versions in which Verity survives or Lowen is a 'dark phoenix,' but chose the ambiguous one.

The film adapts a self-published 2018 novel that Grand Central Publishing acquired in 2021. It spent months on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than a million copies in 2023 alone. This made the film a prominent example of the BookTok-era adaptation. Critics compared it with the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, and some noted its Hitchcock-style climax. Reviews were mixed. On the box office side, it is reported to have grossed over $100 million against a $40 million budget. Online, the ending was widely joked about on Letterboxd, especially the closing interview.

Critical reception was mixed. Some reviewers faulted the film for lacking a visual or thematic identity and for not committing to camp. One gave it 1.5 out of 5. Another said it played safe by leaving the truth to the audience. Audience reactions on Letterboxd were often jokey. Viewers praised the cast, especially Anne Hathaway, and the film's campy pleasures. Many mocked the stilted dialogue and the ending, which closes on a television interview. Overall it is seen as an entertaining but uneven adaptation, and it was a commercial success.