Is VERITY Good? From Commercial Fiction Thriller Novel to Mid Film Adaptation, Ending Explained

I should disclaim: I was always destined to dislike Verity. Plenty of people love the novel, and it seemed like a lot of people in the theater enjoyed director Michael Showalter’s film adaptation.

I didn’t like either one, despite significant ways the film is different from the book, but I never really believed that I would like either of them. I have several reasons for my distaste.

Official trailer for Michael Showalter’s film VERITY, adapted from the thriller by Colleen Hoover.

Commercial Fiction

The genre of Colleen Hoover’s thriller-novel Verity is commercial fiction, which I dislike as a whole—mostly for stylistic reasons, but also because that genre of book tends to be all plot. Readers of commercial thrillers are flipping pages in suspense of learning what will happen, so readers aren’t really paying attention to how and why things happen, and as a result, the writing style doesn’t matter as much.

Commercial fiction genre novels tend to get away with shallow characters (a writer names her eldest daughter a misspelled synonym for “Scold?” Okay, girl), dim settings, and cliché dialogue. Sometimes, the plot is so suspenseful that I can even overlook the ham-fisted meet-cutes and heavy-handed product placement. (Yes, product placement in a novel. Let alone on screen.)

If I have the book in my hands, I’ll DNF on any of those elements. I tend to overlook one or two of these qualities if I have a good audiobook narrator, not only because I’m usually preoccupied with some physical chore, but if the voice-acting is good, it can provide an otherwise lacking depth.

Style

For Verity, alas. None of the characters resonated with me. It’s kind of Dakota Johnson’s thing to downplay every line and action with a micro-expression, so there’s no surprise to me that she was cast as the shallow-yet-beautiful character, Lowen. But, guys, you also had Anne Hathaway co-starring as the character Verity, and Josh Hartnet playing Jeremy! There was a lot to work with… there is absolutely no reason that either of their performances should land so flatly when you’re working with chops like that.

I also want to reiterate that the characters did not resonate with me despite two of the main women protagonists are writers by profession. Like I am.

That’s also a pet peeve of mine, though, writers who write about writing. It’s just reads as lazy, in my opinion. Sort of like when rappers rap about rapping. I mean, “write what you know” is a maxim for introductory creative writing classes. Most people probably won’t care about this little grievance, but I absolutely loathe it.

I’ve also gone on record before to say that if you stick your protagonist in front of a mirror to describe their physicality, that’s lazy, too. So, that happened.

Another pet peeve, this time for film, is voiceover narration. It generally means, to me, that the scene isn’t strong enough, so it needs additional explanation. And, as you know, Verity happens from two first-person perspectives.

Side note: one time I went to a Powerpoint Party where someone argued that books written in the first person were bad. I thought immediately that was an overgeneralization, but the more support she provided, the more correct she became. I mean, Verity certainly could be used as an example of an exasperating pair of unreliable narrators.

Character

Jeremy

Maybe I liked the character of Jeremy the most because his actions spoke for him—he didn’t narrate. Or, maybe I liked him because even in this whodunnit mystery, he seemed like one of the ten good men left on Earth. It’s possible that because both unreliable women narrators were obsessed with him, they portrayed him as likeable, and in that case, we have a success.

Josh Hartnett was also just so friendly on screen that he even delivered the absolutely ridiculous line “Verity has a lot of fancy clothes (you could wear to go on a date with me)” in a believable tone.

Granted, there was great improvement in the monologue Lowen delivers to intimidate Verity into coming clean when she’s convinced Verity is faking her injury. Lowen says, “You have the perfect life. And I’m going to take it from you. Your career, your house, and your husband…”

But what makes Verity break character, in the film, is when Jeremy threatens to leave her. Girl. The gasp that came from the audience when Anne Hathaway’s face came to life and started to defend herself!

It’s also possible that in light of the plot points, I’m on Jeremy’s side.

[spoilers start here]

Yeah, he did it. But we always knew he was the one who done it, right? In one way or another, he was going to have done it—although what “it” was withheld for-fucking-ever. That’s another pet peeve of mine, the false suspense. It makes everything for the first ¾ of the book and film feel like exposition. We knew he was the one who did whatever “it” was from the moment he entered the drama after that horrible pedestrian fatality as the white knight. I clocked that as a too-obvious save-the-cat moment, that old chestnut that writers resort to so that you like the villain.

I mean, Jeremy done some of it. Verity did most of it.

Verity

Dude, at least in the book, Colleen Hoover was not worried about making Verity even a little bit sympathetic, and I do respect that. The novel’s Verity (while her name is too on-the-nose), there’s no doubting that woman is rotten to her core. She’s unequivocally selfish, obsessed with Jeremy and convincing/manipulating him into adoring her. Only her.

Sure, the film illustrates that she’s jealous of her children, but it pulls all its punches. The worst of her terrible shit is all left out. And what they do keep is minimized through comedy. (The best example of this is when Verity unplugs her twins’ baby monitor, wears in ear plugs and an eye mask, and sleeps through the day. She hums and dances while she’s getting ready for bed, even though this moment should be incredibly disturbing.)

The Children

So much of what Verity does to her kids is omitted from the film adaptation. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved that I didn’t have to watch any of that horrible shit, but it also weirdly felt cowardly on the part of the film makers… sort of like they knew the ending wouldn’t hold water if we learned too much about her, so they pulled their punches. I mean, they were right, but still. Stand ten toes down if you’re going to adapt a book to film, imo.

Chasten doesn’t exist at all. Which means we see none of Verity’s favoritism toward her able-bodied child over Harper (Sienna Kulovitz) with a disability. There’s only one accidental child death, when they composited Chasten’s character—probably because a film audience is too wise to accept that both of Verity’s twins died in freak accidents, and not that far apart. Verity doesn’t even believe one of them was an accident, in the novel. (If you do buy that this is possible, you must be in the camp who believes the Staircase Guy didn’t kill two of his wives by pushing them down the stairs.)

We also don’t see Verity’s multiple late-term abortion attempts out of jealousy that her twins are occupying Jeremy’s attention. We don’t see her get back into bed with him, bleeding so he’ll wake up to console her.

We don’t hear that Verity gets pregnant with Crew (Brady Wagner) as a trap, either.

Granted, all of the horrible shit happens in her “antagonistic journaling” manuscript. So does everything from her perspective. But come on. She’s going to write a fictionalized autobiography like that after two of her children have died, and then hide it? As my own mother is fond of saying, “People who have nothing to hide, hide nothing.”

What is it about?

The plot is where commercial fiction truly has to shine… but even the plot of Verity, to me, doesn’t stick the landing. It’s another of my annoyances, an ambiguous ending.

I mean, if the viewer thinks about it for one second, it’s not ambiguous, but the creators seem to think it will linger with us, the question of “Who was worse, Jeremy, or Verity?”

Verity. Verity is worse. She’s the fucking worst, no question.

Ending, Explained

Even if Jeremy did read her “antagonistic journaling” manuscript and take it for truth, and then try to stage her murder as an accident… even if he did that, Verity still took her children who could not swim out in a canoe without live preservers. That is an act of negligence resulting in manslaughter, in my eyes. Does it justify Jeremy’s trying to murder her? Of course not. But I can sympathize.

He also didn’t try to kill her. Hear me out: if he read the autobiography on his own, he was calm enough to make it look like an accident, like her car crashed into a tree. But when Lowen showed the autobiography to him, he flew into a blind rage and tried to choke her out. The second time he read the manuscript? When he already knew what was in it? So I’m supposed to believe that Jeremy is more manipulative than Verity?

Even if he did actually try to kill her—he did not—one thing there is no disputing is this: Verity faked being incapacitated. For months. With many, many opportunities to escape the house, especially with Lowen and the nurse, Anna (Irina Dvorovenko), there to assist.

It is without a doubt more in keeping with Verity’s purportedly-fictionalized character that she faked her level of injury to regain Jeremy’s attention, adoration, round-the-clock care.

And it’s absolutely more consistent with her character that she would sabotage any life he tried to make without her than leave him a goodbye note. The Verity I met would never leave Jeremy, the object of her obsession. Her love for him is unconditional. But the way she loves is also twisted, so it stands to reason that she would try to destroy him rather than see him with anyone else.

Postpartum Psychosis Drama

Y’all know about the Clancy case. I won’t go into it. But Verity does beg the question: was the film adaptation a rushed cash-grab that exploited, fictionalized, and minimized a real-life case? Maybe. Or, in the spirit of not doing that, maybe that’s why they took some of the sting out of Verity’s villainy. I lean toward the latter option.

Verity movie release date in theaters is Friday, October 2.

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