Verity — Ending Explained

Plot turns. Lowen reads the hidden manuscript, which presents Verity as a villain responsible for the drowning death of Jeremy's daughter. She comes to hate Verity, sympathize with Jeremy, and begins a relationship with him. In a Hitchcock-inspired climax she tells Jeremy about the manuscript and suspects Verity is not brain dead and has been faking.

The killing. Jeremy confronts Verity and finds she has fully recovered. In his fury he strangles her while Lowen stands by, complicit. They carry her body to the lake. Months later Lowen returns to the Vermont house one last time. A later letter contradicts the manuscript, so it is unclear which document tells the truth.

Ending. Pregnant Lowen and Jeremy drive away into a new life, and she concludes that the truth will always remain a mystery. The film then returns to Verity, in a TV interview filmed before the accident, with Gayle King. Verity gets the closing line, a remark about certainty, and then it cuts to black. The earlier cuts that Showalter described, including Verity still alive in the lake and a darker Lowen, were abandoned after focus groups.

Hidden meaning. The opening and closing on Verity frames the film as her story from the start. Lowen has been reading her way into Verity's life: the house, the husband and the dress.

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.