When you’re a struggling writer, you’ll take any employment opportunities. So it is with Verity protagonist, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a novelist whose works languish in obscurity. That’s why, when she’s offered the chance to ghostwrite a new book for famous, newly incapacitated author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), she reluctantly accepts. Even when the job demands she stay at Verity’s gorgeous, snow-covered Vermont home with the author, her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and her son, Crew (Brady Wagner), Ashleigh doesn’t refuse. It’s just that hard out here for wordsmiths.

While a recent car crash has Verity confined to bed, unable to move, her presence looms large. Ashleigh’s discovery of the author’s secret autobiography only compounds it. With it shedding grisly light on Crawford’s past, our protagonist finds herself unable to stop thinking about her host. Getting closer to Jeremy doesn’t help either.

While film fans might know Colleen Hoover only as the author of novels adapted into romantic melodramas heavy on wish-fulfillment fantasies—It Ends with Us, Reminders of Him—Verity speaks to the other genre she dominates on bookstore and Target shelves everywhere: steamy thrillers overflowing with twists and turns. Unfortunately, the genre switch-up doesn’t make its adaptation to the silver screen—by Nick Antosca—any more compelling than Hoover’s underwhelming previous forays into cinema.

Pairing Antosca with director Michael Showalter handicaps the film from the start. Aside from his Hannibal scripts, the screenwriter known for dreary horror films Antlers and The Forest, lacks the bravura to bring this story to life properly. Showalter, meanwhile, has transitioned from comedic actor to journeyman filmmaker. Neither has experience executing salacious, steamy material with panache, leaving the film overly timid. This needed a Paul Verhoeven or Karyn Kusama to unlock the project’s fullest unhinged potential. Instead, the few twists fall flat. Most of the libidinous behaviors amount to little more than missionary sex and nibbling on a headboard. Only a masturbation sequence involving Ashleigh imagining smooching Crawford and blood-inducing chomping suggests things getting a little wild.

Otherwise, Verity largely focuses on Ashleigh opening up laptops, reading papers, or staring out windows at a frozen lake. Antosca and Showalter don’t even conjure up interesting visual representations of Crawford “reading” her contempt-riddled autobiography to Ashleigh. Instead, she’s relegated to limply realized flashbacks, stagnant medium shots of typing away at her computer, and endless voiceover. That said, his visual impulses here are a step up from his last few streaming-exclusive titles. The split-diopter shots in one flashback, for instance, are a nice nod to the master of salacious thrillers, Brian De Palma. He and cinematographer Jim Fronha also wisely center several Verity images around marinating in Amy Williams’ terrific production design. But better than the past isn’t the same as good enough.

Compare this tedium to the bonkers Stalked by My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge, the kind of Lifetime thriller where writer/director Doug Campbell makes the audience genuinely unsure what is real. Its visual digressions, including riffs on Audition and La La Land, only deepen that sense of unpredictability. Verity, by contrast, is weirdly resistant to such creative silliness or idiosyncrasy. It putters through rudimentary plot points and character arcs, with rare flashes of weirdo creativity—like having Ashleigh and Jeremy’s meet-cute hinge on a pedestrian exploding into a geyser of blood when a bus hits them—only highlighting its otherwise pervasive ordinariness.

The one bright spot is that Hathaway knows exactly what kind of film Verity should be. She sinks her teeth into a devious character who relishes saying things in private, like wishing she suffocated her newborn baby, while perfectly embodying the polished author in interviews. Her line deliveries are magnificently juicy yet executed without any irony. As she demonstrated uttering the word “Daddy” endlessly in Serenity, Hathaway knows ridiculous material is best served via endless sincerity. Whether playing comatose in the present or seething with barely suppressed rage toward her husband in flashbacks, Hathaway doesn’t miss a beat. Five features into 2026 and she’s just as magical on-screen as ever.

Verity harkens back to features that excelled when chaotic horniness and imaginative twists ruled above all else. Unfortunately, this boilerplate exercise more often than not produces shrugs rather than gasps. The changes from the book (such as erasing the autism of Verity and Josh’s deceased child, perhaps so as not to anger the RFKs of the world by reminding them autistic people exist) suggest a movie afraid to jostle the boat or raise the ire of Amazon executives. Even its “ambiguous” twist ending feels like a cop out instead of a memorable gut-punch. Perhaps it’s enough for the book’s fanbase. For those who love Bound, The Handmaiden, and Body Heat, this effort, save for some delectable Anne Hathaway acting, doesn’t come close to inspiring collar tugs.

Verity starts haunting theaters everywhere on October 2nd.

Verity Trailer: