Having seen “Verity” — the latest screen adaptation of a novel by popular romance novelist Colleen Hoover, which hits theaters this week — it’s hard not to chuckle a little when reading the movie’s production notes.

“Hoover was inspired to write her first thriller due in part to feeling disappointed in a horror film’s unearned plot twists,” the notes state.

That’s pretty rich considering that the psychological romance drama’s director, Michael Showalter, seemingly set out to make a fairly faithful adaptation of Hoover’s book AND that the film’s twisty but unsatisfying conclusion feels so poorly thought out.

We can’t dig into that ending here, of course.

But until that point, the wannabe-Hitchcockian affair — about a struggling author being hired to continue a bestselling series of thrillers by an incapacitated writer, with the former becoming drawn to the latter’s husband — works as a largely sumptuous guilty pleasure. It looks good and progresses its semi-silly plot nicely before, well, crashing and burning.

Although she plays what you’d consider a supporting character, Anne Hathaway gets top billing as the movie’s namesake, Verity Crawford, who’s penned a highly popular series of thrillers told from the psychopathic villain’s point of view.

Dakota Johnson, meanwhile, is front and center as Lowen Ashleigh, a largely unknown scribe. (We meet her as she’s conducting a book reading, at which one of the few people in attendance answers their un-silenced phone and engages in a conversation. It’s rough.)

On her way to what her agent, Corey (Ismael Cruz Cordova), has told her is a very important meeting, Lowen comes in such close contact with death at a busy Manhattan intersection that she is covered in the recently deceased person’s blood. To her rescue: Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), a concerned stranger who leads her to a nearby restroom to get cleaned up and even gives her his button-down shirt off his back.

Of course, when Lowen arrives at the meeting, she finds Jeremy among the people at a conference table. He is Jeremy Crawford, husband of Verity, and they’re at the publishing house of Verity’s novels. The company is looking for someone to continue the series, as Verity is unable to do so — at least for now — following a car accident, Lowen is told. Initially, she declines, but after Jeremy tells her that Verity is a big fan of the “undiscovered” author, she eventually accepts.

That means Lowen will need to spend some time at the Crawfords’ lavish, remote Vermont home to go through Verity’s plans for where her book franchise would go. Upon arrival, she meets 8-year-old Crew Crawford (Brady Wagner), whose twin sister, Harper, had somewhat recently died. (The latter is portrayed in a flashback sequence by Sienna Kulovitz.)

She also meets Verity, who, much to her surprise, is catatonic; the public does not know that she cannot talk or make voluntary movements — something Jeremy admits he deliberately kept from Lowen.

While attempting to get into Verity’s creative mind, she accidentally unearths her unpublished biography, the pages of which paint her in an increasingly unflattering light, to say the least. Lowen also experiences visions of Verity (or are they?) and eventually wonders whether her famous host is truly in her apparent condition.

Meanwhile, she’s developing an attraction to devoted father Jeremy, as, obviously, he is to her.

Hathaway (“The Odyssey,” “The End of Oak Street”), who starred in Showalter’s middling 2024 romance film for Prime Video, “The Idea of You,” gives the best performance of the lead trio, but that isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

Johnson (“Materialists,” “The Lost Daughter”) continues to display a rather limited range with yet another performance lacking in dynamism. She’s adequate, at best.

That may be more than we can say for the underwhelming Hartnett. (To be fair, though, we may largely be struggling with getting his laughably cartoonish performance in writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s laughably bad thriller “Trap” out of our minds.)

Showalter is a talented director, having early on earned acclaim for 2017’s “The Big Sick” and delivered the underappreciated 2020 comedy “The Lovebirds,” both starring Kumail Nanjiani. He shows a steady hand for most of “Verity” but is undone by Hoover’s plotting, or at least its representation here as adapted by Nick Antosca, creator of Apple TV’s highly disappointing recent series adaptation of “Cape Fear.”

“Verity” is the fifth Hoover book to be adapted for the screen, the fourth in movie form, the previous three being “It Ends With Us” (2024), the incredibly sappy “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him,” released earlier this year. While none has been a hit with critics, Hoover has more than her fair share of fans, so even while no other projects have been announced, it’s hard to imagine “Verity” will close the book on such endeavors.

“Verity” is a heavily loaded title, the definition of the word hinting at the trick the tale tries to pull off in its final moments. Feel free to investigate that on your own before heading to the theater — or, perhaps more sensibly, before the Amazon MGM Studios release eventually hits Prime Video.

———

‘VERITY’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images)

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: In theaters Oct. 2

———

©2026 The News-Herald (Willoughby, Ohio). Visit The News-Herald (Willoughby, Ohio) at www.news-herald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.