Verity (Movie Review): Double Twists and Diminishing Returns
Struggling author Lowen Ashleigh is hired to finish the remaining books of a blockbuster thriller series after its original author, Verity Crawford, is left catatonic following a car crash. To sift through Verity’s notes and outlines, Lowen moves into the Crawford estate with Verity and her grieving husband, Jeremy. While sorting through the office, Lowen stumbles across an unpublished, intensely disturbing autobiography detailing horrifying confessions about the deaths of the couple’s twin daughters. As Lowen grows closer to Jeremy, the tension escalates into a question of who is manipulating whom.
Spoiler Warning: Full spoilers for the plot, twists, and ending of Verity below.
I watched Verity last night. My wife read the book and was genuinely excited for the film adaptation, so her hype got my expectations up. Unfortunately, the movie did not deliver. It lands somewhere around a 2 to 2.5 out of 5 for me.
The Setup and The Three Suspects
When a psychological thriller isolates the story down to three core characters, you immediately start running the math: at least one of them has to be the villain. As the story unfolded, I saw three potential scenarios:
- The Husband (Jeremy): He seemed almost too sympathetic. A plausible angle was that he intentionally put Verity in that incapacitated state, keeping her locked away while cycling through ghostwriters to maintain the lucrative franchise (or perhaps they were in on the business arrangement together).
- The Incapacitated Wife (Verity): She is faking her catatonic state, biding her time.
- The New Writer (Lowen): Verity’s books were always written strictly from the villain’s perspective, and the movie itself is framed entirely through Lowen’s perspective. It felt entirely possible that Lowen was an unreliable narrator or the actual orchestrator.
Twist #1: The Telegraphed Reveal
The first twist, that Verity was faking her comatose state the entire time, was pretty obvious. Between the tight camera angles, the lingering tension in the house, and the general tropes of the genre, you could see it coming a mile away. Still, an obvious twist is not necessarily a bad one if the fallout is handled with conviction and sharp character motivation.
That is not what happened here.
Twist #2: Where Logic Falls Apart
The second twist completely ruined the movie for me.
We learn through a hidden letter that the horrific manuscript Lowen found was not an actual confession at all, but rather a writing exercise where Verity wrote from an antagonist’s point of view to process her grief, and that she was actually terrified Jeremy was going to kill her.
The mechanics of this make zero sense:
Why leave the manuscript behind? If Verity was fully mobile, capable of sneaking around the house, and terrified of what Jeremy or anyone else would think, why not destroy or delete the manuscript outright? Leaving incriminating writing tucked away where a new writer or child could stumble across it is pure plot convenience.
Ambiguity without payoff: Thrillers work best when the audience tries to figure out who is lying and why. Here, by killing Verity off before she can ever explain herself or confront the truth, the story tries to have it both ways. Instead of a satisfying resolution, you are left guessing two unrelated things at once: what her actual motive was, and who was actually the villain.
Trying to pull off a “was it real or was it fiction?” rug pull right at the finish line felt cheap and unearned. A good twist recontextualizes the clues you saw earlier; this one just invalidated them to force an unearned cliffhanger.
Final Thoughts
If you are going to build an entire narrative around a character faking a medical condition, you need airtight motivation and coherent character actions. Verity sacrificed internal logic for shock value. Maybe having high expectations based on the book’s reputation made the disappointment worse, but as a standalone thriller, it missed the mark.
Rating: 2.5 / 5