Director Michael Showalter shows no feel whatsoever for the erotic thriller genre in this unintentionally funny tale of a ghost writer haunted by the author she's emulating.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
Amazon/MGM Whenever Hollywood latches obsessively onto the oeuvre of a pop novelist du jour, the law of averages dictates that the ensuing spate of films can’t be all bad: More than a couple of those ’90s John Grisham-based potboilers were solid, while in “The Notebook,” we actually got one Nicholas Sparks movie that people remember two decades later. Four films in, however, we’re still waiting for the Colleen Hoover adaptation that makes her books’ vast popularity at all clear to the unconverted. A dunderheaded riff on “Rebecca” filtered through a Clinton-era erotic thriller aesthetic, “Verity” at least has a clearer narrative hook than the variously dull “It Ends With Us,” “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him,” which have collectively racked up over half a billion dollars in the last two years. But it’s a flat-footed dud, at once overwrought and underplotted, and barely propped up by A-list stars who look either embarrassed, confused or indifferent to be there.
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