Verity (2026): Writing, Desire and Familiar Screen Baggage

Lede

Verity turns writing into a blood sport, then asks two actresses with very memorable screen histories to pretend the audience arrived with amnesia.

Hermit Off Script

Verity worked for me for a simple reason: I had fun. Frankly, I would rather have watched this on IMAX than Digger, which managed to carry a reasonable message while somehow failing to entertain me with it. Verity is hardly sensible either, but at least its nonsense knows how to move. It also landed rather close to my latest hobby that became reality a few years ago: writing. Thankfully, my experience of becoming an author involved fewer disturbing manuscripts, suspicious mansions and people treating drafts as potential murder weapons, but seeing writers on screen hits differently once you’ve actually spent years producing words yourself. Then there are Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. Both arrive with long careers behind them, and if you love films, their previous roles do not politely disappear when the lights go down. Dakota Johnson walks onto the screen and somewhere in my brain Fifty Shades of Grey immediately opens an old filing cabinet. Hathaway has decades of roles behind her too, and Love & Other Drugs is certainly capable of wandering into the same badly behaved corner of memory. So while I was watching Verity, I genuinely wondered for a moment whether the casting had been influenced by that previous screen history. There is no evidence of that, and almost certainly it was not, but who exactly told the human brain to behave logically? Famous actors do not enter a film alone. They drag old characters, scenes and associations behind them whether the new script invited them or not. And to be clear, the joke is not that either actress has appeared in sexual material. The joke is that Hollywood spends years creating screen associations and then expects the audience to perform a factory reset. Meanwhile, Verity keeps changing what sort of story it wants me to believe from beginning to end, which may simply be the Colleen Hoover ingredient working as intended. Digger gave me a message and lost me. Verity gave me writers behaving badly, unreliable stories and nearly two hours that actually moved.

Verity | Official Trailer

Movie synopsis

Struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh is hired to continue the successful book series of bestselling author Verity Crawford after an accident leaves Verity unable to complete it herself. Lowen moves into the Crawford home to study Verity’s notes and begins finding material that makes the boundary between fiction, confession and manipulation increasingly difficult to judge. Anne Hathaway plays Verity, Dakota Johnson plays Lowen and Josh Hartnett plays Verity’s husband Jeremy.

Cast and credits

Director: Michael Showalter.
Writers: Nick Antosca, screenplay; based on the novel by Colleen Hoover.
Genre: Psychological thriller, mystery, crime, drama and romance.
Main cast: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Cordova and Brady Wagner.
Composer: Volker Bertelmann.
Production company/studio: Amazon MGM Studios, Eat the Cat, Semi-Formal Productions, Shiny Penny, Somewhere Pictures and Heartbones Entertainment.
Runtime: 116 minutes 57 seconds for the UK cinema version according to the BBFC; IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes list 114 minutes.
Release year and platform: 2026; released in UK cinemas on 2 October 2026.

What does not make sense

• Hollywood spends years making actors unforgettable in certain roles, then casts them again and quietly expects the audience to arrive with freshly wiped memories.
• Writing becomes suspiciously dangerous the moment cinema gets involved. Real authors usually face rewrites, deadlines and paragraphs that looked brilliant yesterday and criminal this morning.
• The story changes what the audience is meant to believe so often that watching starts to resemble unpaid editorial work.
• Verity somehow feels more deserving of an IMAX screen than Digger, despite being powered mainly by manuscripts, suspicion and people making increasingly poor decisions indoors.
• One writer finishing another writer’s work should be a publishing problem. Here it looks roughly as safe as accepting a mission in an action film.

Sense check / The numbers

1. Verity opened in UK cinemas on 2 October 2026, and the BBFC gives the cinema version a runtime of 116 minutes 57 seconds. IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes list 114 minutes, so the published runtime differs slightly between sources. Either way, it is close to 2 hours. That measures the commitment, not whether the story earns every minute. [BBFC / IMDb]
2. Colleen Hoover’s Verity dates from 2018, while the film arrived in 2026 – roughly 8 years later. The adaptation therefore comes with years of existing reader expectations before Hathaway or Johnson even enter the frame. [Google Books / Sony]
3. Fifty Shades of Grey was released in 2015, 11 years before Verity, with Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele. That confirms why the association can still exist in a viewer’s memory. It proves absolutely nothing about why she was cast in Verity. [Universal]
4. Verity opened with about $32.6 million domestically and $62.6 million worldwide, while Digger managed about $8 million domestically and $20 million worldwide during the same weekend. Apparently quite a few other people also chose the writers behaving badly. The numbers prove stronger opening demand, not that one film is objectively better. [AP]

The sketch

Scene 1: Fresh characters
Two actress silhouettes stand in a casting room while long strips of old film trail behind them like shadows.
Dialogue:
Director: “Fresh characters.”
Audience: “We remember everything.”

Scene 2: The writing career
A writer sits beside a laptop while an enormous manuscript on the desk casts a threatening shadow across the room.
Dialogue:
Writer: “It’s only writing.”
Manuscript: “That’s adorable.”

Scene 3: Premium judgement
A huge IMAX auditorium displays a serious prestige film while a smaller neighbouring screen marked Verity has a queue outside.
Dialogue:
IMAX: “Prestige booked.”
Viewer: “Fun went next door.”

What to watch, not the show

• How famous actors carry previous roles into new films whether studios want those associations or not.
• How book adaptations arrive with years of reader expectations already attached.
• How erotic and psychological thrillers use star image as part of the attraction without ever admitting that old screen history is part of the experience.
• Which films cinemas give premium formats to, and whether prestige, spectacle and actual enjoyment always point towards the same screen.
• How films romanticise writing into mansions, secrets and dangerous manuscripts while actual authors quietly argue with commas.
• Whether audiences increasingly reward films that entertain cleanly rather than films that merely arrive carrying respectable intentions.

The Hermit take

Verity is messy, glossy and fun enough to make its own nonsense part of the entertainment.
The actresses bring the film, and our memories bring the rest.

Keep or toss

Keep.

Keep the performances, writer madness and shifting story.
Toss the fantasy that famous actors can ever enter a new role without their old films following them into the room.

Sources

• Sony Pictures UK – Verity official film page: https://www.sonypictures.co.uk/movies/verity
• BBFC – Verity UK classification and cinema runtime: https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/verity-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmte2mjc3
• IMDb – Verity cast, credits and technical details: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32261958/
• The Numbers – Verity production credits: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Verity-%282026%29
• Google Books – Colleen Hoover’s Verity: https://books.google.com/books/about/Verity.html?id=aIygzgEACAAJ
• Universal Pictures – Fifty Shades of Grey: https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/fifty-shades-of-grey
• IMDb – Love & Other Drugs: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758752/
• Associated Press – Verity and Digger opening-weekend box office: https://apnews.com/article/7d59b53ae7dbbb22d661d421c941988d