There’s plenty of that to go around, too, beginning with a bizarrely grisly meet-uncute between Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), a young novelist with acclaim but no sales to write home about, and slick realtor Jeremy Crawford (Hartnett). The two are on the same Manhattan street corner when a passing cyclist is hit and killed by a speeding vehicle — promptly spattering blood all over Lowen, just as she’s on her way to a meeting with her publisher. Gallantly helping her clean up in a nearby coffee shop, Jeremy offers her both his clean white shirt and some peculiarly chosen words of comfort: “I’ve seen worse… I pulled my eight-year-old girl’s body out of a lake.”
Cue pretty much all the uneasiness you’d expect from a stranger moving in with a family recovering from not one but two recent tragedies — but Lowen’s snooping does yield the manuscript of a seemingly secret memoir being written by Verity shortly before her accident, so it’s all worth it. Narrated by Hathaway in arch, Transatlantic-accented voiceover, the memoir flashes back to how she met Jeremy, how she became a writer, and how postpartum depression put paid to their married idyll. But not all of this is how Jeremy, who puts the moves on Lowen more or less from the get-go, tells it.
Who to believe? Whose truth is the truth? And honestly, who really cares either way? After a whole lot of wintry lifestyle porn and surreptitious stalking down soft-carpeted corridors, “Verity” takes more than an hour to reach so much as a low boil, but its twists are second-guessed and double-bluffed to death, even as Showalter punctuates certain revelations with literal thunderclaps in the background. It’s all more muted and anticlimactic than you’d want or expect from a film where Dakota Johnson gets to call a wheelchair-bound Anne Hathaway “a selfish Machiavellian cunt,” and never remotely sexy, despite two characters’ best efforts in the back of a limo, and a masturbation scene in a rock-carved bathtub that mostly looks uncomfortable for all concerned.
