Name: Verity
Director: Michael Showalter
Released: 2026-10-02T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 117 min
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett

Some actors are reviewed; Dakota Johnson is argued about. Verity, Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s thriller, has given that argument a new round, and its first reviews read less like verdicts on a film than like rulings on an actress. The same performance is called indifferent in one trade and inimitable in another, and neither critic is describing a different register. They disagree only about what her stillness means.

The consensus headline writes itself: another Hoover adaptation that fails to convert the unconverted, with Anne Hathaway leaning into camp as the author trapped in her own house. What that framing passes over is the casting question underneath it. Lowen Ashleigh, the ghostwriter at the centre of the story, is thin on the page, as more than one review notes. A role that thin is carried almost entirely by what the actor brings to it, which turns Verity into a referendum on the one quality critics have never agreed about.

Two critics, one performance

At Variety, Guy Lodge writes that “indifferent” mostly applies to Johnson, “an actor whose signature passive screen presence” can be “an intriguing asset to the right film.” He draws the line to her past without hesitation: the “coolly ironic air” she brought to the Fifty Shades trilogy, he suggests, presumably factored into her casting in a comparably lurid project. He even singles out the script’s one self-aware line, in which her character admits to having “resting bored face.”

At IndieWire, David Ehrlich reads the same quality the other way. Johnson, he writes, is “even better in a role that might have seemed thankless in the hands of a less elusive and/or convincing actress,” with “an inimitable talent for palpably thinking through the truth of a moment, so that we can almost see Lowen’s empathy at war with her desires.” Johnson’s “hilariously gruesome first scene,” he adds, “triggered welcome memories” of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, a film in which Ehrlich once called her work “thrillingly unrepentant.”

The reviews in between split along the same seam. ScreenRant’s Liz Declan finds that Johnson “unequivocally shines,” that her “slightly aloof acting style completely works in this context,” and that she “has never seemed more comfortable and confident in front of the camera.” TheWrap’s Amelia Emberwing observes that there is not much to Lowen, which “is kind of the point,” and that Showalter takes full advantage of the actress’s comfort with her body. Passive, elusive, aloof: the critics agree on the description. The quarrel is over whether it is a flaw or the whole method.

Where Verity sits in her filmography

Read across her body of work, Johnson’s career has run on two tracks. On one sit the studio vehicles she does not steer: Fifty Shades, which made her a star and a sex symbol and brought her a Golden Raspberry, and Madame Web, a critical and commercial failure that brought her a second. On the other sit directors who build films around her reserve: Guadagnino in A Bigger Splash and Suspiria, Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Lost Daughter, Cooper Raiff in Cha Cha Real Smooth, Celine Song in Materialists. Critics including The Independent’s Louis Chilton and The Washington Post’s Sonia Rao have argued that few of her films fully use those enigmatic strengths.

Verity belongs to the first track. The project was assembled around Hathaway, who signed on as Showalter came aboard, before Johnson and Josh Hartnett joined the cast. The producer credits Variety lists include Hathaway and Hoover, not Johnson, who has taken producer credits elsewhere, Splitsville among them, and founded her own production company, TeaTime Pictures. After Madame Web she described the studio side of the job with unusual candour: “We don’t have control over how something turns out.” In a film that Variety says Showalter directs with “no feel whatsoever for the erotic thriller genre” and that IndieWire finds more silly than scary, her stillness has no frame to hold it. That is why the reviews end up judging her rather than the film.

Release, cast and what comes next

Written by Nick Antosca from Hoover’s 2018 novel, Verity had its world premiere at the Curzon Mayfair in London on September 24 and opens in US theaters through Amazon MGM Studios on October 2, with Sony Pictures Releasing International handling other markets on the same date. It is rated R and runs 117 minutes. Hathaway plays the bestselling author Verity Crawford, Hartnett her husband Jeremy. Variety counts it as the fourth Hoover adaptation after It Ends With Us, Regretting You and Reminders of Him, which together took in more than half a billion dollars in two years. The film will also screen in the Gala section of the Tokyo International Film Festival in late October.

At the London premiere, Johnson told Reuters the film was “so thrilling, it’s so sexy,” and “kind of a lot like life,” before naming the role she wants next: “I would love to be a villain. It’s so fun to play a crazy person.” Her next project moves behind the camera, with a directorial debut, A Tree Is Blue, written by her Cha Cha Real Smooth co-star Vanessa Burghardt.

Asked about the sleepwalking scenes cut from Verity, Johnson told E! News: “It’s just not necessarily that interesting to watch someone sleepwalk.” Her admirers and her detractors would both sign that sentence. They would simply be thinking of different performances.

Tags: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, film reviews, Colleen Hoover, Verity