Verity (2026) Movie Review: Fifty Shades of Beige

The Verity film adaptation boasts a strong cast and gorgeous design, but Colleen Hoover’s lurid thriller loses heat on its way to the screen.

As a film, Verity has a harder time extending that invitation. Its actors improve the characters, and its craftspeople give their world an expensive, imposing beauty. Yet it seems embarrassed by the material that made the book compulsive reading. Verity keeps the scandal and loses too much of the appetite. A story this ridiculous needs enough momentum to keep us from inspecting the plumbing.

Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, of Suspiria) is a struggling novelist grieving her mother when an offer arrives to finish a bestselling author’s series. Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett, of Trap) wants her to take over for his wife, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway, of The Idea of You). An accident has left Verity unable to write, a condition concealed even from her publisher. Lowen moves into the family’s secluded home and finds what appears to be Verity’s autobiography, full of disturbing disclosures.

Lowen needs the money, envies the success, and finds the husband difficult to ignore while his wife sits upstairs, staring ahead and eating soft foods. Each page changes how she sees this family, although her attraction to Jeremy complicates her judgment. Discovering something terrible might also be convenient for someone who wants so much of what Verity has.

Director Michael Showalter reunites with Hathaway after The Idea of You, and his attention to actors pays off. I initially struggled to picture Hathaway and Johnson in these roles; afterward, I wondered whether the material deserved them. Hathaway moves between the incapacitated Verity and the glamorous woman Lowen encounters through her reading. Her imperiousness suggests a Miranda Priestly streak, amusingly filtered through an actor who once played the assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. Early appearances with Gayle King and on Hot Ones establish Verity’s celebrity, making her later disappearance harder to swallow.

Johnson excels at playing women teetering on life’s fence without making you want to yank them down. She gives Lowen’s uncertainty enough weight to explain why she stays when she should leave. Hartnett supplies the appeal Jeremy needs: handsome, attentive, and burdened enough to encourage sympathy. I believed Lowen would want him, but the writing too often lets his desirability answer questions about his behavior.

That’s where this adaptation starts frustrating me. Neither actress needs this material softened, yet words from the manuscript and other visual flourishes interrupt the physical encounters. They connect Lowen’s reading with her imagination but make the sex oddly remote. There’s a lurid hot tub scene and overhead shower imagery, but nudity alone doesn’t make an erotic thriller erotic. Attractive people in tasteful compositions can’t supply the missing anticipation. That much-discussed headboard survives, bite marks and all; I kept thinking about the dental consequences.

Screenwriter Nick Antosca makes sensible adjustments without abandoning the novel’s main progression. The trouble is that preserving its plot while reducing its excess exposes the contrivances. The Crawfords have remarkably few friends or relatives asking questions, and concealing a famous author’s condition requires more explanation than this film offers. Verity’s public profile makes that incuriosity especially implausible. Once Lowen arrives, everyone beyond the property becomes conveniently unimportant.

The house itself is another matter. I’d happily look around longer, preferably with the occupants elsewhere. Production designer Amy Williams makes it disarming, cozy, and imposing, sometimes within the same room. Stone intrudes into the interiors, sunken spaces draw people farther inside, and ceilings alternately open up or press down. Art director Joseph Fernandez’s recurring V shapes extend Verity’s presence through the glass and dressing. Cinematographer Jim Frohna gives these spaces depth and the actors striking places within them. My reservation is with how often the film admires the environment when it could be making us afraid to remain there.

Jacqueline DeMeterio’s costumes tell a more persuasive story about seduction than several sex scenes. Lowen’s darker, practical clothes distinguish her from Verity’s glamour, while Jeremy’s soft, luxurious wardrobe makes him look comfortingly approachable. These people are selling Lowen a life, even when they aren’t consciously trying to. The beauty could make the ugliness underneath more shocking; instead, the cool presentation keeps both at a distance.

References to Dressed to Kill and Basic Instinct include borrowed wallpaper and an ice pick. Those are affectionate nods, but the older thrillers’ willingness to be excessive matters more than their furnishings. Verity needed more of that nerve. Volker Bertelmann’s score supplies some agitation through sharp accents and swelling passages, though I’ve heard better work from him. The music sometimes announces tension the action hasn’t earned. I could appreciate what I was hearing without feeling what it wanted me to feel.

The ending left me with much the same dissatisfaction as the book. Its choices felt more head-scratching than provocative, and competing interpretations need a convincing route to them. I’m happy to argue about unreliable people, less interested when the argument requires excusing so much of the construction.

Hoover fans should find plenty to recognize in this film adaptation, while the actors improve characters I didn’t much like on the page. There’s enough performance and visual craft to keep Verity watchable, which makes its caution more disappointing. I respect the effort to give the material emotional substance; I just wish it hadn’t cost so much fun. The cast convinced me to stay with these people. The film never convinced me to lose my good judgment around them.

Verity will be released in U.S. theaters, in U.K. and Irish cinemas, and globally in theatres on October 2, 2026.