Hathaway and Johnson Have Fun. The Movie Doesn’t

I love erotic thrillers. There’s just something irresistible about watching characters throw their lives and their sanity away for the chance to sleep with the object of their desires. Like Basic Instinct, in which detective Nick Curran falls into bed with Catherine Tramell, a crime novelist who might just be describing the murder he’s investigating. It makes no sense, but everyone involved is so committed to their melodramatic vision that it works.

Verity has all the makings of a great erotic thriller. It has an intriguing premise based on a best-selling novel in which a ghostwriter becomes entangled with the husband of the woman she’s ghostwriting for. It features two of our biggest stars, Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, along with millennial heartthrob Josh Hartnett. It’s directed by Michael Showalter, the filmmaker behind the successful book-to-screen romance The Idea of You.

On paper, this should be dark, sexy, and tortured. But while Hathaway and Johnson commit to the trashy fun, Showalter plays it safe, and Verity ends up being just fine.

What is Verity about?

Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is one of the world’s most successful authors. The film delightfully establishes her credentials by showing her making the rounds on the country’s biggest talk shows, from CBS Mornings with Gayle King to Hot Ones with Sean Evans. In these interviews, she charmingly explains how she keeps her dark and vivid imagination apart from the idyllic life she leads with her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and their kids. Verity has it all.

Then there’s Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson in a smart riff on her Fifty Shades of Grey character), a struggling genre writer whose book reading draws an audience of two. On her way to an important meeting, Lowen watches a driver run over a bike rider, splashing her face with blood. It’s an abrupt twist that immediately raises the stakes.

A handsome stranger takes Lowen to a public bathroom to clean up. He turns away when she takes off her bloodstained shirt and then lends her his own. It’s charged and romantic despite the gruesomeness that preceded it. When Lowen finally makes it to her meeting, her savior is there, waiting. He’s Jeremy Crawford, and he’s offering her millions to ghostwrite Verity’s next book from the family’s mansion in Vermont.

The tension Lowen felt in that bathroom is back in force, but with one caveat: Verity is living in that same home, paralyzed after a terrible car accident.

It’s a juicy premise, blending the Gothic ambiance of the remote home and the “madwoman in the attic” with the conventions of an erotic thriller. We all know Lowen and Jeremy will fall in love. It’s just a matter of when. The film is a modern take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, with Verity lingering in the background of Lowen and Jeremy’s dynamic as they grow closer.

Hathaway and Johnson are in on the joke

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

Erotic thrillers require a willingness to feel trashy and look ridiculous. Hathaway easily gets there. When Lowen finds a secret manuscript in Verity’s office, showing Verity’s true and unvarnished self, we get to watch the character’s “true” life story play out onscreen. In these scenes, Hathaway has so much fun playing the role in a different register than the woman we met earlier in those polished interviews. In her manuscript, Verity documents the best moments in her life, like the start of her romance with Jeremy and her rise as an author. She also writes about the resentment she feels over becoming a mother, revealing that, once Jeremy leaves the house, she ignores her infants’ cries to catch up on sleep.

Johnson also commits to erotic thriller levels of absurdity, approaching the role with her well-established deadpan delivery. Lowen, much like Verity, has plenty of secrets, including a tortured past she refuses to talk about. She spends her days fantasizing about Jeremy as she reads through Verity’s secret manuscript, stuffing it under the couch cushions to keep it all to herself. Lowen is living in the home of a paralyzed woman and flirting with her husband, but she feels no remorse; she seems to enjoy it. The more she reads about Verity and the more of her darkness she uncovers, the more leeway Lowen feels to invade. The character’s biggest red flag? Lowen stirs her creamer into her coffee with her finger.

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

The star power of both women works in the movie’s favor, but also to its detriment. Hartnett is not nearly as strange or watchable as either of his co-stars. He’s flat with the material, saddled with cheesy, plucked-from-the-book lines that he doesn’t sell. To return to the Basic Instinct parallel, Catherine (Sharon Stone) is sexy and alluring every time she’s onscreen. She might have killed her lover, but we understand why Nick (Michael Douglas) can’t stay away. Verity is Lowen’s story, and Jeremy is her Catherine, but there’s little more to him than being a good dad. He’s handsome. We get it.

The flat register of Hartnett’s character creates a house-of-cards problem. With one weak card, the entire structure collapses. In a fantasy scene that has since become the trailer’s talking point, Lowen kisses Jeremy as he morphs into Verity. It’s alluring and terrifying, establishing that Lowen not only wants Verity’s husband, but Verity’s place as a whole: her success, her life. She’s already living in her house, writing in her voice and eating dinner with her son. It leaves us wanting more complexity from Lowen and Verity. What we get instead is more Lowen and Jeremy.

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

The sex scenes also rely on Lowen and Verity’s dynamic. There’s a bite mark on the headboard that Lowen notes when she first arrives at the house. She bites into it later, putting herself in Verity’s place in bed. But Showalter can’t seem to get a grip on everything that dynamic is carrying, all of the envy and the lust that are in the text. He seems more comfortable with the clear-cut (Lowen and Jeremy’s first kiss has a sweet frosting detail that sells it), turning the camera away when things get uncomfortable. When Catherine and Nick writhe dramatically in bed, they look ridiculous, but the direction is so assured that their passion comes through. Showalter’s commitment to serviceability, to making his stars look gorgeous but never messy, holds the movie back.

The erotic thriller invites you to go along for a wild ride, one where you shrug off moments that, in any other genre, would have you saying, “That would never happen.” It’s an unspoken agreement you make with the filmmaker: you let the absurdity slide for a good time, for the chance to watch characters lose their minds over passion. But Verity is too controlled, too serviceable to commit to the bit.

Verity releases in theaters on Oct. 2.