SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Verity,” now playing in theaters.
To say that “Verity,” a new erotic thriller featuring the ubiquitous Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson — who gets to call the former “a selfish, Machiavellian cunt” — has sharply divided critics would be an understatement. This thing has taken a bigger beating than a piece of beef hanging in Rocky Balboa’s meat locker (our own critic called it a “a flat-footed dud”). And the majority of the film’s detractors took issue with its ending. (It is still predicted to win the box office weekend, becoming Hathaway’s third No. 1 movie this year.)
Directed by Michael Showalter (“Search Party”) and adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, the film tells the tale of Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), a struggling young author who’s recruited by Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), the hot husband of novelist Verity Crawford (Hathaway), to ghostwrite the final book in her popular series from their secluded (and palatial) house in the woods. You see, Verity suffered a recent accident that’s not only left her wheelchair-bound, but also unable to talk or move a muscle. Once Lowen finds a manuscript stashed away by Verity, however, she realizes her idol may be far more sinister than she seems.
While Showalter took a number of liberties with Hoover’s source material, including eliminating one of the dead children — a move Hoover, who consulted on the film, called “the best change we could have made” — he’s kept the book’s ending largely intact, though he almost didn’t.
Verity’s manuscript reveals that she was resentful of her two children — and how they’d pulled Jeremy’s attention away from her — from the moment they’d entered the world. One day, she took their son and daughter out on the lake in a kayak and, knowing the children couldn’t swim, capsized it on purpose, killing their daughter (the son miraculously survived). Lowen grows to hate Verity and feel deep sympathy for Jeremy after consuming their memoir, eventually fucking and falling for him. Only Verity is alive! She’s been faking being paralyzed and mute the whole time! Once Lowen and Jeremy discover this, he chokes her to death at Lowen’s behest and they dump her body in the lake.
The action jumps six months into the future. As Lowen (now pregnant) and Jeremy are packing up the Crawford home, she finds a letter tucked under the floorboards claiming that the manuscript was merely a writing exercise where Verity was envisioning the darkest version of herself, and that after finding the manuscript, Jeremy attempted to kill her. Consumed by guilt, Verity acted paralyzed as penance, and to remain close to Jeremy and their remaining child.
“We tried a hundred million different ways to end this movie,” Showalter tells Variety. “Figuring out how to end the movie was the biggest challenge and the last thing that we did.”
“Verity” ends with pregnant Lowen and Jeremy driving off together into their new life as she looks out the window and ponders what the truth was regarding Verity, ultimately determining that it will always remain a mystery. But that wasn’t the ending that Showalter and his team originally intended.
“There’s two very significant other ways that the movie ended,” he explains. “In one version, Lowen, in that car scene, has that moment where she says, ‘I don’t know who to believe. One thing’s for sure: Verity was a master manipulator.’ And then she puts on a pair of sunglasses, leans back, and has this very cat-with-a-mouse-in-its-mouth look, puts her hand out the window, and as they’re driving away and a song is playing, she’s making [waves through the air] with her hand. So, the idea is that Lowen is the master villain. And then, you cut back to Verity sinking into the lake and her eyes open.” Yes, Verity was still alive!
Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway in “Verity.”
©Amazon/Courtesy Everett Collection
It’s an ending that seems more in line with the film’s campiness on its face, but Showalter says he couldn’t seem to get it to land the way he’d wanted.
“We tried a hundred different versions of that — of Verity still being alive, and of Lowen being the dark phoenix, because we liked it and it was really, really cool,” he says. “It was this amazing moment of, Holy crap! Has Lowen been the mastermind the whole time? It was the ending we always thought we were gonna do and it was what we had planned on. So, not showing her put the glasses on was such a massive revelation to realize.”
Showalter and the studio held a series of focus group screenings with audiences — a mix of those who’d read the book and those who hadn’t — and they kept getting the same specific feedback regarding the “dark phoenix” ending.
“A lot of times, when you’re screening a movie [for focus groups] and you’re getting feedback, the feedback is generic. It’s like, ‘I didn’t like the ending,’ but they may not be able to really tell you why. And what we figured out was, it’s because they want Lowen to be in a place of uncertainty when the movie’s over,” he shares.
Showalter continues: “It took us a really long time to realize the audience isn’t ready to make the kind of decision at the end of the movie that we had been giving Lowen. Lowen had this moment where she put on the sunglasses and was like, I don’t give a shit, and the audience wasn’t ready to go there with her. The audience wanted her to be like, What the fuck have I done? We realized the audience is Lowen and the audience wasn’t ready to put those glasses on.”
Hoover was “open to changes” between the book and the movie but stresses she’s satisfied with the ending they went with. “I couldn’t be happier,” she tells Variety. “I feel like you walk away from the movie with the same feelings you walk away from the book with and that was what I was hoping we would ultimately end up with. Those screenings really helped.”
Leave a Reply