Like the Colleen Hoover novel on which it is based, Michael Showalter’s film Verity is improbable and misogynist. This is par for the course in the genre of psychological gothic suspense. The question is what ugly urges are externalized in those unlikely, serrated plot switchbacks. And there Verity has some calculating revelations about why female villainesses and femme fatales are such a useful trope—and not just for men.
The title character is Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), a best-selling author of psychological gothic suspense novels which feature evil scheming sociopathic female villainesses. Verity has suffered a debilitating injury after a car accident, and a young writer she admired, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is hired to complete her popular series. In looking through Verity’s notes, Lowen finds an autobiographical manuscript in which Verity reveals herself to be one of her own sociopathic female villainesses. She’s obsessed with her hunky husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and detests her twin children Crew and Harper, the latter of whom died in a boating accident.
Lowen is horrified as she learns more about Verity’s sinisterness. She’s also increasingly disturbed when she sees Verity moving or walking; the author is supposed to be paralyzed.
But is Lowen really horrified and disturbed? Lowen admits that her own dark novels sometimes “freak her out,” but the worse Verity proves herself to be, the more Lowen feels comfortable expressing the less savory, less good-girl aspects of her own character. As she gradually admits to herself and to the viewer, Lowen lusts after Verity’s husband. She lusts after Verity’s career. She even lusts after Verity’s house.
Lowen starts out as a kind of romcom protagonist; she and Jeremy have a little meet when she witnesses a bike messenger accident on the street and he helps her clean up. But romcom protagonists aren’t supposed to be driven by envy and spite and rage. They’re not generally supposed to try to manipulate eight-year-olds for information, either, and they certainly aren’t supposed to contemplate inflicting bodily harm upon their incapacitated rivals. Johnson initially plays Lowen as demure, shy, and almost inert—Jeremy comments that he can’t tell if she’s just bizarrely calm or traumatized. But as the film progresses, and Verity’s evil provides her with an excuse, Lowen slowly becomes more Verity-like. She slinks around in Verity’s dresses. She hisses out villainous rants like Verity’s characters.
You could argue that the truth of Verity is that Lowen is the real villain. But Verity isn’t a movie about what’s real. It’s more about genre and why certain themes are so appealing. In a world in which women are supposed to be naïve passive objects of male interest and selfless caregivers of children, women with ambition, frustration or lust, are demonized as unwomanly conniving monsters.
Those unnatural women allow men to express rage and violence directed at them. But they can also function, in gothic romances like Rebecca, as a kind of deflection, allowing the protagonists to pose as pure even as they scheme and commit unpleasantness to defeat the bad woman. Misogynist caricature allows everyone who’s not so caricatured—men and women—to embrace violence, hate, jealousy with no consequences. As Lowen whispers to Jeremy, their resentments and worse than resentments can be a secret just between the two of them.
Most psychological thrillers and/or gothic thrillers aren’t as self-aware as Verity; it’s difficult to indulge in a catharsis of hate and rage when you’re aware you’re looking for an excuse to indulge in a catharsis of hate and rage. It’s no wonder the film can’t resolve its dual thread, and ends up dead-ending into the ambivalence of literary fiction rather than going for the jugular. Still, until its last few minutes, Verity manages to comment on the genre and embody it—an impressive exercise in gothic doubling, as well as a pleasure to watch.