“There is a good film hidden somewhere within this pretty bad one.” “Considering the pedigree of talent involved in this adaptation, why is this so bland and lifeless?!” “Verity builds everything around a clever final twist that sticks in your brain, but the story never earns it. Not creepy enough or steamy enough, it plays as a dull erotic thriller that needed to iron out some kinks early on” (Rotten Tomatoes).
I clearly missed the memo. I loved Verity (2026) and stayed hooked for all 117 minutes, even while the internet sharpened its knives. I also read the book and spent months counting down to the premiere, so I couldn’t resist digging into where the film stays loyal to Colleen Hoover’s novel and where it veers away. (Spoilers ahead!)
The 2026 adaptation follows Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling horror writer, and Verity Crawford, a celebrated best-selling author in the same genre. After a car accident leaves Verity incapacitated, her husband Jeremy hires Lowen to finish the series. Lowen moves into the Crawford home and settles into Verity’s office, where she uncovers a hidden manuscript. It’s a brutally honest autobiography filled with dark, twisted confessions. The closer Lowen grows to Jeremy and his young son, and the deeper she falls into those pages, the harder it becomes for her to tell reality from deception and imagination. The film ends with Verity dead and Jeremy and Lowen together, but just before the credits, Lowen finds a letter that says the manuscript was merely a writing exercise.
The end of the story gives the reader a choice: to believe the evil manuscript, or the convincing letter.
The first change that jumped out at me was the family. In the book, Jeremy and Verity have three children: twins Chastin and Harper, and a younger son named Crew. Chastin dies from her severe peanut allergy, and Verity later confesses in the manuscript that she favored Chastin and blamed Harper for the loss, which is why she lets Harper drown in the lake. Verity also tells Crew to “hold his breath” during the boating accident, making it clear that Crew is her favorite. The film erases Chastin entirely, making Harper and Crew the twins. Verity now resents both children equally and would have let them both drown had Crew not saved himself. I cannot help wondering why the filmmakers made this cut. Was it a casting issue, a runtime issue, or a creative choice? Rewriting the family seems like more work than simply keeping it as is.
The omissions get even darker. In the novel, Verity is so threatened by the idea of her husband loving their children more than her that she attempts to end her pregnancy with a coat hanger. The attempt fails, and Chastin is born with a scar on her forehead. For a first-time reader, this is the moment that convinces you Verity is truly evil, and the film skips it completely.
The film also drops Lowen’s history of dangerous sleepwalking, which is a major piece of the book’s tension. After Lowen sleepwalks into Verity’s bed, Jeremy agrees to lock her bedroom door from the outside each night. Everything seems under control until the evening Jeremy and Lowen are in her room together and discover that someone has locked them in. Lowen is convinced Verity did it and is faking her condition, while Jeremy insists she is simply stressed and paranoid. Throughout the book, Lowen has proved to be anxious and mentally unstable, cemented by her sleepwalking, making her an unreliable narrator. That back-and-forth is what makes Lowen’s suspicion feel both urgent and uncertain, and without it, the film loses a key source of suspense.
Jeremy is another character who feels different on screen. In the novel, when Lowen shows him the manuscript, his first question is where she found it, which hints that he already knew it existed. In the film, he reads it, looks genuinely devastated, and storms into Verity’s room. To me, this version of Jeremy reads as innocent and oblivious, just a devoted father trying to care for his son and his incapacitated wife. He’s clearly furious, but anyone who hadn’t read the book would never suspect he could kill Verity, which makes the letter come out of left field. In the book, the slow build left everyone feeling unreliable, not just Verity.
This leads me to the biggest gap, which is depth. The novel’s manuscript is far more gruesome and disturbing than the film’s version, but it’s also more layered and ambiguous. Jeremy has more complexity, and Lowen is an unreliable narrator whose sleepwalking and shaky mental state keep you questioning everything. I remember devouring the book and awaiting every cruel page of Verity’s confession. So many puzzle pieces were in play, including Lowen’s unreliability, the mystery of Jeremy, and the nagging question of whether Verity was lying. Readers wondered whether Lowen was imagining things because how could a woman deemed paralyzed fake it for so long? The film simplifies all of this into one obvious villain. Verity feels purely evil while Jeremy and Lowen come across as innocent, and the movie spends more time building the romantic bond between Lowen and Jeremy than the unsettling relationship between Lowen and Verity.
Online critics have also taken aim at the actors’ performances and the psychological buildup. I keep seeing Dakota Johnson described as detached, dry, and flat, while Anne Hathaway is said to be acting in a different, higher-caliber film. Josh Hartnett gets labeled soapy and stiff, and all three leads are accused of lacking chemistry and clashing in tone. I thought Hathaway was excellent, especially in the stark contrast between the vivid, lively Verity of the manuscript and the catatonic Verity in the bed. I pictured Lowen as guarded and dry, someone who keeps people at arm’s length, but I felt Johnson’s version lacked her anxious edge. She never came across as unreliable. If anything, her quiet, observant nature made her seem trustworthy. A more scattered, jittery energy, with shakier camerawork and less hawk-like focus, could have planted the seeds of doubt. Hartnett, meanwhile, seemed to be starring in a gut-wrenching romance instead of a psychological thriller. The film leaned into his connection with Lowen at the expense of tension, and many of his lines sounded like those of a hopeless romantic.
As for psychological buildup, the final 30 minutes were intense, especially the scene where Lowen presses a thumbtack into Verity’s hand to force a reaction. Before that point, though, faking never felt like a real question. Maybe this is because I read the book, but I think a lot of movie-goers thought the same. Lowen sees Verity move her head while drinking coffee by the window and spots her with Jeremy in the kitchen, so it seems highly likely that Verity is not paralyzed. We simply assume Verity is a brilliant actress, and the suspense becomes about when she’ll make her move and whom she will hurt, not about whether she’s faking it at all.
Overall, I thought the movie was entertaining and the leading ladies brought the novel to life. Are you team manuscript or team letter?