The idea of a gorgeous, successful career woman who’s a perfect mom with a perfect husband having a horrific and twisted dark side is certainly intriguing. For this same woman to be a wildly successful author who writes best-selling books from the perspective of the villain while maintaining her idealized, covet-worthy life certainly sounds like a character worth unraveling.
Unfortunately, Verity is not up to the challenge of this potentially chilling and thrilling premise.
Comparisons will definitely be made to the surprise domestic-thriller blockbuster hit The Housemaid. But where that film was equally sexy, juicy, and gory, with more than its share of shock-laughs, this film takes roughly the same dynamic (a beautiful younger woman takes employment in a house with a perfect, suffering husband who is dealing with a not-so-perfect wife), but with a lot less fun, more grim twists, and a plodding plot that pretends to have a poker face while showing you all the cards.
In this case, Dakota Johnson is a struggling thriller writer who has been hired (hush hush) to be the ghostwriter for the wildly successful author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), who, she is told (gasp!), has been permanently incapacitated in a car accident. The publisher needs their bestselling writer to keep pumping out books, so Lowen is hired to finish the latest series in the famous woman’s name. What Lowen doesn’t know is that Verity and Jeremy’s perfectly rustic Architectural Digest home is haunted by another tragedy: the drowning death of one of the couple’s twin children.
While digging through Verity’s notes—and being wigged out by bedridden and glassy-eyed Verity’s uncanny ability to spook Lowen by appearing in windows despite being otherwise unresponsive—Lowen finds a hidden manuscript by Verity, a tell-all memoir. It’s a horrific account from the mind of a monster, a woman who is not at all what she seems, and Lowen is not sure what she’s gotten into. Except, of course, hot-yet-suffering Jeremy’s bed.
The audience giggles at the opening moment when Lowen is standing on a street corner in New York and is bucket-of-blood splashed in the face when a bicyclist gets mowed down right in front of her. If the film had continued with this level of over-the-top shock moments, it might have had something. But the giggles continue throughout, working against the movie rather than with it, like a laughable “you have something on your lip” moment leading to an inappropriate makeout session. Or a weird day nurse who says blunt things to Lowen but brings an ominous tension that is never explored. Or the little boy sucking the peanut butter off a knife, blade first (come on, Lowen, say something!).
Sexing up the story offers surprisingly little heat. The three leads are all undeniably gorgeous humans, but there’s more fizzle than sizzle. Lowen masturbates in a bathtub, apparently after getting turned on by Verity’s memoir (which reads like bad online erotic fiction). In flashbacks, Verity is always dressed in blood red, from her outfits to her lipstick, in stark contrast to her porcelain skin and dark cascading hair. Both women, of course, want to straddle sweet, handsome Jeremy. There’s even a moment (highlighted in the teaser trailer) that shows Hathaway and Johnson making out. But don’t get your hopes up for a sapphic twist; it’s a very brief fantasy/dream sequence.
In one moment, Lowen explains to Jeremy that she really is having a good time on an impromptu date in a restaurant, but that she has a “resting bored face.” Or maybe Dakota wasn’t actually having much fun. It’s hard to blame you, Dakota. We, the audience, weren’t having much fun either. Seriously, this kind of formula film should be a bona fide crowd-pleaser, but it never clicks into place. Fans of this genre, I would hope, should demand something better. Perhaps we could just look forward to the next Housemaid movie instead.
