Amazon MGM dropped the first trailer for Verity and I have watched it three times now. Anne Hathaway is terrifying in this thing.
She plays Verity Crawford, a bestselling author who is bedridden after a mysterious accident. Dakota Johnson is Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer who gets hired to move into the Crawford home and finish Verity's book series. Josh Hartnett plays Jeremy, the husband caught between them. On paper it sounds like a standard thriller love triangle. In practice, Colleen Hoover's source material is one of the most unnerving books to blow up in the last decade, and the trailer makes it clear the adaptation is leaning all the way into that energy.
What makes the trailer work is how much it withholds. You get the setup. You get the house. You get Hathaway lying in that bed with an expression that could mean anything. And then the footage starts cutting between moments that suggest nothing in this story is what it appears to be. The pacing is genuinely unsettling, which is exactly what this material needs. A glossy, overly polished approach would have killed it.
I think the casting is smart across the board. Hathaway has always been good at playing characters who are performing a version of themselves, and Verity Crawford is essentially a woman whose entire existence might be a performance. Johnson brings the right kind of quiet uncertainty to Lowen, someone who is in over her head and knows it but cannot stop herself from going deeper. Hartnett as the husband is the piece I was least sure about going in, but the trailer sells it. He has that quality where you genuinely cannot tell if he is a good guy or not.
The book has a twist that people either love or find completely insane. I am not going to say a word about it here. If you have read it, you know exactly what I am talking about, and the question of how they handle it on screen is the whole ballgame. If you have not read it, do yourself a favor and do not look it up. Go in blind. This is one of those stories where knowing less makes everything hit harder.
Amazon MGM has been on a quiet streak of making smart acquisitions and getting them in front of the right filmmakers. Verity looks like another one where they understood the assignment. The tone is right, the cast is right, and the trailer has the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is. I will be there opening day.
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