"The truth depends on who's telling it.”
If “Verity” reminds of you of last year’s wildly mind-blowing, “The Housemaid,” you’d be right.
Similar components are there – a young woman moving into a wealthy family’s home and there’s a potential affair between the outsider and the husband.
With a dash of “Gone Girl,” there may be another thing or two elements in this Colleen Hoover’s adopted novel that might bear similarity to the other films, but that’s about it. The way the story flashes back and progresses is vividly different.
Vivid is an emphasis here, because the wife and world-renowned author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway; “The Devil Wears Prada,” “The End of Oak Street”) is in catatonic state due to a car accident.
The story is told from Verity’s hidden memoir manuscript, “So Be It,” as read by the Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, “Materialists”). The words (voiced by Hathaway) fly off the screen vividly, so darkly descriptive and sensationally salacious.
It does beg the question how famous crime fiction writers could creatively come up with stuff terrifyingly twisted, such as writing stories from the villain’s viewpoints. Is it purely from their imaginations or something else in their psyche?
Talented Lowen is a far lesser-known author, who has written in the similar genre, and has been invited by the publisher to ghostwrite the rest of Verity’s unfinished, profitable book series, “Noble Virtues.”
Lowen is staying in the Verity’s and her husband’s, Jeremy’s (Josh Hartnett), luxurious lakeside house in Vermont, since Verity has a lot of materials scattered in her home office prior to the crash.
The picturesque wintry setting and distinctively designed house is its own character, lending itself to a noir story and jump scares.
Located by a frozen lake with falling snow all around, the sprawling mid-century modern house is dazzlingly dominated by warm woods, with sunken shelves, brick walls, wood panel-covered refrigerator, stone sinks and tub adorning parts of the house.
The lurid manuscript starts from the beginning, where Verity and Jeremy first met at a party, how their chemistry-packed relationship took off right away to where Jeremy asked Verity to move in with him and asked her to marry him during, voiced with intrigue and shown with lascivious details, and not bloodlessly. Then how Verity first became a writer, pregnant with their twin babies, and caring for them once they were born. The attraction and obsession were palpable.
If you guess these are all mundane milestones, you’d be wrong. The scenes seductively pull you in little by little, until you’re sucked into a shocking vortex, gasping with startling realizations. And when you think you’ve figured it out, a triple twist come out slashing.
The troubling, penultimate scenes will make you challenge reality and the head-spinning ending question which unsettling version of the story is true.
The film does require you to suspend disbelief for an extended period, but if you’re game, you’d be disturbingly entertained.
“Verity” lacks the intensity and campily entertaining element of “The Housemaid,” but the psychological thriller’s what ifs? are unnervingly fun to think and imagine.
Who’s manipulating who? Who would you believe? What would you have done? And what would you do?
For a character and movie named “Verity,” don’t believe everything you see and hear! What’s fiction might be real and what’s real might be fiction.
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