Verity

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

World-renowned author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is taking some time off despite constant pressure from her publishing house to churn out another bestseller. The truth is she figured in a car accident and is physically and mentally unable to write, which prompts her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) to seek a ghostwriter who can organize his wife’s disorganized thoughts in the form of notes and hopefully come up with a novel from there. Published but unrenowned novelist Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is hesitant to step in, fearing that Verity’s readership will feel the difference in voice and tone. After some convincing from Jeremy as well as a payday that her penurious life cannot refuse, Lowen moves in with the Crawfords and meets the now catatonic and paralyzed writer. As she organizes her notes and finds a secret unpublished manuscript, the pressure almost drives her mad, seeing Verity stalking her around the house, unable to determine whether it’s real or hallucination.

This would have been my fifth Anne Hathaway film this year, had I not begged off watching The End of Oak Street because I wasn’t in the mood for dinosaurs that month. I wouldn’t be able to comparatively judge her acting in that film. I’d place her acting in Verity at 2nd place right under The Odyssey and just above Mother Mary, followed by The Devil Wears Prada 2. The Odyssey is obvs Oscar-baity; Mother Mary, too abstract for full appreciation; The Devil Wears Prada 2, the bare minimum for a nostalgia-induced movie. I feel like she had the most fun in Verity because she got to play around with ambiguity. Weird, but accessible.

While the storyline of Verity intrigued me, the viewing experience has not been that enjoyable because the plot structure is just too similar to that of The Housemaid. Yet another case of “same candy, different wrapper.” It doesn’t help that they are both psychological thrillers with a dash of erotica. Verity’s advantage, perhaps, is how the material is about novelists, which automatically makes you wary of an unreliable narrator. This aspect I kind of enjoyed in hindsight, on the way home, doing a rerun of the scenes in my head and pointing out the red herrings. As the title cleverly suggests, Verity makes you question Truth as a concept.

In terms of twists and plot device, what propels the plot forward is an unpublished manuscript in a USB where what seems to be an autobiography implicates the author in some really disturbing and fvcked up deeds. And then a letter, from the same author, surfaces toward the end where she claims that the autobiography is actually just a creative writing exercise. This also emerges as the narrative’s main point of contention among viewers and readers. Which of the two, written by the same author, is true?

Even then, I think the point of the movie is that the truth is not what it used to be. Regardless of the absolute truth and its implications, in this day and age it just serves as a tool that benefits whoever can manipulate it best, reframe it for a particular agenda. In the film we see the repercussions in a smaller, domestic, scale, but it’ll be naive to ignore the combo of social media and disinformation in the era we live in, how it has encroached not just into the lives of individuals but has decided the fate of entire nations, too. After all, we live in a post-truth era. 

Verity maximized her ability to bend the truth not just to advance her career, but also manipulate her life, and everyone in it. Her fiction bled into her reality and this is the brilliance of this narrative. Where does fiction end and where does truth begin? We don’t know. To be honest, though, I feel as though I would've enjoyed it more were it revealed that the entire movie was just Verity's new book. Or Lowen's. All those parallelisms between the two women thrown in only to be discarded in the end. Wasted opportunity after all that build-up!