'Verity' Is in Theaters Today — and Critics Are Split Down the Middle

Colleen Hoover's Verity is in theaters as of today, and the critical conversation around it is already fascinating — not because everyone agrees, but because they so clearly don't. The adaptation from Amazon MGM debuted to sharply divided early reviews, with review aggregators hovering in the mixed-to-negative range at the embargo lift, even as one element earns near-universal praise: Anne Hathaway.

Directed by Michael Showalter, the film stars Hathaway as the mysterious, incapacitated author Verity Crawford, alongside Dakota Johnson as the ghostwriter hired to complete her work and Josh Hartnett as the husband caught between them. The premise is pure gothic thriller — a woman discovers a hidden manuscript that suggests the invalid wife she's replacing may not be as helpless as she seems.

Hathaway Does the Heavy Lifting

The one point of consensus among critics: Hathaway is extraordinary. Performing a role that is largely dialogue-free, she conveys menace, vulnerability, and calculation through expression and physicality alone. Reviewers describe it as a masterclass in screen presence — a reminder that few working actors can hold a frame the way she can.

It's also a remarkable capstone to her year: this marks her fifth film release of 2026, a pace that would exhaust most actors and yet seems to have sharpened her. Whatever one thinks of the film around her, Hathaway's performance is being discussed as the reason to buy a ticket.

Why the Divide?

The split in reviews appears to come down to the adaptation's handling of Hoover's notoriously twisty source material. Fans of the novel know the story lives and dies on its ambiguity — the manuscript's revelations, the questions about who's telling the truth — and critics are divided on whether Showalter's version preserves that delicious uncertainty or flattens it into something more conventional.

Johnson and Hartnett have their defenders among reviewers, but the film's tone is the flashpoint: some critics found the gothic atmosphere intoxicating, others felt it tipped into melodrama. For a thriller built on psychological gamesmanship, that tonal knife-edge is everything.

Divided critics rarely hurt a Colleen Hoover adaptation — her fanbase is famously loyal, and the book's readers have been waiting for this one. Verity is in theaters now. Go see it, then argue about the ending. That's clearly what it's built for.

The divided response also fits a pattern for Hoover adaptations, which tend to split critics while thriving with audiences. The author's readers are famously devoted, and they arrive with strong feelings about how the story should play — which makes consensus almost impossible and opening weekends reliably strong. For Verity, the book's built-in fanbase may matter more than any review, and Hathaway's universally praised performance gives even skeptics a reason to show up.