Verity 2026 Movie Review
Verity is the cinematic equivalent of a twisty, silly, and disposable, yet undeniably entertaining, thriller you buy at an airport bookstore and devour while you wait for your flight to take off. It’s trashy, campy, occasionally stupid, and somehow wildly entertaining. Is it great? Absolutely not. Did I eat it up anyway? Unfortunately, yes.
This would’ve killed in 1995… and honestly, maybe it still will today.
There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about how shamelessly pulpy the whole thing is. Verity harkens back to those ’90s and early-2000s erotic psychological thrillers, complete with psychosexual tension, luxurious houses hiding horrible secrets, cheesy dialogue, over-the-top reveals, and characters making increasingly frustrating decisions. It’s sexy, soapy, and stupid-although perhaps not quite enough of all three to completely maximize the insanity of its premise.
It’s also incredibly watchable. The film slowly pulls you deeper and deeper into this increasingly messed-up situation, constantly leaving you wondering where it could possibly be going next. There’s something genuinely interesting within its examination of truth and how easily it can be manipulated depending on who gets to tell it, blurring the lines between fiction, obsession, attraction, and reality. I’ve never read the book, but I have to imagine that format lends itself better to a story so dependent on perspective, internal doubt, and questioning what you can actually believe. On screen, some of that ambiguity feels less effective. A few of the eventual reveals are fairly predictable, while one in particular genuinely deflated the story for me and left me more annoyed than shocked.
It’s hard to hate a film when you had so much fun with it, but it’s equally easy to recognize when much of that fun is coming at the film’s expense. The psychosexual tension often plays more like a heightened soap opera, and some of the flat acting and awkward dialogue resulted in plenty of unintentional laughter throughout. Dakota Johnson, in particular, feels like she’s giving approximately zero effort at times, with line deliveries that turn moments meant to be tense or seductive into something considerably funnier.
But Anne Hathaway? She understands the assignment completely. She tears into every ridiculous line and deliciously dark moment like she knows exactly what movie she’s in, delivering the kind of heightened, committed performance this material desperately needs. There’s a confidence to her campiness that makes it feel deliberate, and every time Verity threatens to become too self-serious, Hathaway seems ready to drag it back toward the pulpy erotic thriller it should be.
And ultimately, that’s where I landed with Verity. It’s icky, uncomfortable, seductive, ridiculous, frustrating, and just twisted enough to keep you invested. Sometimes it feels completely aware of its own absurdity; other times I genuinely couldn’t tell whether I was laughing with it or at it. But I was genuinely impressed by how much its ending left me thinking afterward, particularly about everything the film had been playing with surrounding truth, perspective, and manipulation. For something this silly and disposable, I certainly wasn’t expecting to still be turning it over in my head once the credits rolled.
Call it trashy, call it ridiculous, call it bad-I can’t exactly argue. But I was eating it up anyway.
