There is, in the current film landscape, a kind of contemporary thriller that mistakes intensity for tension. A kind of film that gives the audience a setting where every room seems to contain a secret, and every secret contains another secret, and hopes that by doing this, suspense will be birthed as a result. What is born, however, is that certain dejected feeling that one experiences at a party, when someone will interrupt the natural flow of the evening to whisper something you think – or rather, hope – is a sensational piece of gossip, but turns out rather to be something painfully commonplace. What time they’re getting the bus home, for example, or what they had for lunch that day. Verity, the fourth of Colleen Hoover’s books to be adapted for the screen, belongs to this particular phenomena.
Verity follows relatively unknown author, Lowen Ashleigh, as she’s tasked with finishing a book series for one of the most popular crime writers, Verity Crawford, who has been involved in an accident which has left her unable to write. With next to no information but paid handsomely for the project, Lowen moves into Verity’s home and discovers that the world-renowned author is completely incapacitated. What follows is an attempt at an erotic thriller that mostly forgoes anxiety and suspicion for overly graphic sex scenes that add nothing to the plot besides making you wince from how ludicrous it all is.
The characters perform in constant contradictions to themselves, and the plot meanders its way through a sequence of events that are tied together with what could be mistaken as an invisible string – which is to say, no string at all. I do believe that this story made sense to Hoover at one stage in its development, but somewhere along the way, it seems that a decision was made to prioritise disorientation in some attempt to trick the audience into believing they have been transformed, when in actuality, the film does little undress you because it’s too busy deciding what it wants you to wear next.
In this way, Verity is a film that struggles fundamentally to be a film. Instead, it’s a mismatched sequencing of events that on the surface never really gives you enough to truly be suspicious of anyone – even Verity, who we’re led quite forcefully by the hand to believe is a vicious filicide who has been lying about her condition to wreck havoc on Lowen and her own family. This may be because rarely does Lowen, our protagonist, ever question anything. She blindly accepts things as they happen, leaving the audience with a smattering cheese board of random events, all sharing a dichotomy that nobody questions, so why should we?
In some defence of this, some might argue that the film bristles against conventional storytelling purposely, but we have to wonder for what reason. You might suspect that the ending of the film would carefully wrap up this sense of disorientation in some way, but again, Verity refuses conventionality. At the end, after another twist that actually feels quite substantial, Lowen departs Verity’s home with the epiphany that, after everything that she has experienced, she doesn’t know what she believes, before literally asking the audience to choose which story they believe. But what can we believe? Isn’t the job of a film to tell us – or, at the very least, gives us tangible options?
This seemingly intentional rejection of conventional storytelling is certainly annoying, but imagine for a moment that it is an intentionally interesting choice. Imagine it’s a ‘meta’ choice that attempts, as most meta films do, to comment on questions about the world that matter. What matters, then, in the world of Verity? The uncomfortable transition into motherhood, and the ambiguous feelings that couples have to navigate when they introduce a child into their social circle? No, the film does ‘opposite day’ logic on these themes at the very end. Okay, well, what about abuse, or celebrity, or even the creative process – all things hinted at throughout the film? Well, not really, because you’re literally told that any of these things could be true, or none of them could be. This refusal to answer any of its fundamental moral questions in literally any way is a frustrating one, that does not serve the film. It is one that tells us that whatever commentary that can be scraped together from this film is about as consistent as morning dew. You can certainly see the way it glistens on the grass in the early morning light, but you can never really hold it in your hand, and when you try to you just get your shoes wet.
What cannot be taken away from the film, however, is that it is genuinely quite fun. When not taken too seriously, the bizarre plot and equally bizarre characters do provide enough entertainment to keep you sat for its almost two hour runtime. While in this, Dakota Johnson can as believably play an author as much as she can believably drink a bottle of water, which is not at all – this absurdly adds to the film’s charm. None of the principal actors are there to give groundbreaking performances, because it’s not a groundbreaking story; instead, they’re all there to have fun, and while there is a lot to dislike here, there is still ostensibly a feeling of enjoyment. Perhaps the film’s greatest weakness is in its inability, decidedly or not, to say anything of substance, but by the end, you almost don’t need substance anymore. You have been so thoroughly tricked, by bright set pieces and intense moments, into some sense of amusement that, as I walked out of the screen, I had the very distinct feeling that whatever enjoyment this film gave me might not be so dissimilar to the enjoyment my five year old niece feels when she watches Cocomelon.
At one point early in the film, Lowen looks through the floor to ceiling windows of Verity’s expensive living room at the frozen landscape outside and asks Jeremy, Verity’s husband (played by Josh Hartnett), is that a field? No, Jeremy replies, it’s a lake. This interaction almost perfectly sums up the film. What you might think is a field, turns out to be a lake. And similarly: what you might think is a film, turns out to be a two-hour collection of scenes with all the narrative complexity of an ingredients list on a tin of beans.
