by Delphine McGee, Contributor
I spent years taking recommendations from Booktok and being let down, again and again, by what always turned out to be lackluster storytelling. In 2022, a certain author exploded in popularity on the app: Colleen Hoover. After multiple videos of people recommending her thriller Verity—which follows a struggling writer who finds a shocking confession in the office of Verity Crawford, a world-famous author who has been incapacitated in a car accident, after she is hired to complete Verity’s series of thrillers—I decided to take a chance on it, and was rewarded with a book so objectively dogshit that I swore off taking recommendations from Booktok ever again.
But one benefit of Hoover’s flat, superfluous writing is that it lends itself very well to adaptation. So when I saw trailers for Verity pop up—starring Dakota Johnson, no less, the patron saint of cinematic flops—I knew I had to see it, which is how I found myself at the Apollo on a Saturday night, sitting next to my friend in a mostly empty theater. I think we spent about half of the movie’s runtime shaking with silent laughter, caught somewhere between bemusement and the delight of a so-bad-it’s-good movie.
Some moments of the movie are so awkward and comical that you can pretend, for a scant few scenes, that Verity is self-aware satire—at one point Lowen (Dakota Johnson) says that she doesn’t read airport books, the irony of which is almost as conspicuous as the displays of Hoover’s books in front of countless Hudson News stores. Her books pass as “adult” literature because of their explicit sex scenes and dark subject matter—she’s tackled suicide, stalking, domestic abuse, murder, etc., but rarely with any tact. Her prose vacillates between the infuriatingly bland internal narration of her protagonists and her clunky attempts at humor, or romantic chemistry, or genuine emotional drama in her dialogue: “Your writing is going to make you famous. Your mind is incredible. If I could fuck it, I would,” says Jeremy, Verity’s husband and Lowen’s love interest.
Verity’s vision of evil is so bland and nonspecific it’s maddening. This is maybe articulated best in the many excerpts of Verity’s writing we’re treated to: in both her novels and confessional manuscript, So Be It, Verity’s writing is so heavy-handed and tawdry that it momentarily tricks you into thinking that this might be intentional. This illusion of self-awareness, though, disappears when the movie tries, again and again, to assert itself as a Serious, Compelling Thriller.
Anne Hathaway reads these quotes with an earnest theatricality that only exacerbates their ridiculousness. Jeremy asked me to move in with him, Verity tells us over a flashback scene of the two of them in bed. He does that, sometimes. Asks me life-changing questions while he’s fucking me. Hathaway delivers this last sentence as though we, the audience, are supposed to be thrilled and scandalized by… what? The most vanilla pre-marital sex imaginable?
Audience reception to Verity seems to be largely negative. Hoover’s books are still wildly popular, but she’s already been subject to backlash over a number of controversies, which opened the door for people online to share their dislike of her work—a few now-infamous quotes from some of her romances have provided her haters with an easy response to anyone who might try to defend her skills as a writer. There were likely a number of dedicated Verity fans who were excited for the movie adaptation, but they’ve been drowned out by the scathing reviews. It’s definitely not a good movie, but it’s also not quite audacious—or unintentionally funny enough in its badness—to be immortalized among other terrible films like Birdemic or Cats. It’s just a trivialized and shallow depiction of sociopathy, and I hope to God that it’s the last we’ll have to hear of Colleen Hoover for a long, long time.
