Verity Keeps Its Darkest Twist as Film Opens in Theatres

Verity keeps its secret.

The film version of Colleen Hoover's 2018 novel opened in theatres on 2 October, directed by Michael Showalter and starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, as The Hollywood Reporter reported, in an adaptation that holds close to the book's unsettling structure.

The set-up is simple. Lowen is a struggling writer brought in to finish Verity Crawford's book series. Verity, a successful author, has had an accident that leaves her paralysed and unable to communicate. Lowen moves into the family home to work through her notes.

Then Lowen finds something else. Hidden in the house is a manuscript, Verity's unfinished autobiography. In it, Verity admits she killed one of her children and let her husband Jeremy believe the death was an accident. The pages recast everything Lowen thought about the household.

A second document flips the story again. Lowen finds a letter in which Verity claims the manuscript was not true. It was fiction, a writing exercise suggested by her publisher. Readers are left with two versions. Both cannot be right.

The film keeps that split. Jeremy confronts Verity over the child's death, with Lowen's help, and ultimately kills her in vengeance. The killing plays as punishment for a crime that may or may not have happened. No clean answer follows.

Hoover said she wrote her way into that ambiguity. She told The Hollywood Reporter she did not know how Verity would end when she started it. She realised about two weeks before delivery that the story did not need a resolution. The lack of one became the point.

Showalter built the film around the same idea. He told The Hollywood Reporter that each actor has their own version of what is true in the story, and he wanted to honour each version. Hoover said she reread the novel after watching the film and the film gave her a new perspective on her own book.

What makes this stand out is how little is settled. For fans, this means the debate moves from page to screen intact. Hoover, also the author of It Ends with Us, as Moviefone noted, wrote a thriller that asks readers to choose. The film, released theatrically in October 2026, asks viewers to do the same.