Verity kept making me laugh at moments when I am pretty sure it wanted me to gasp. That sounds like a complaint, and sometimes it is, but I had a very good time watching this ridiculous movie. The romance is cringeworthy, the dialogue makes some strange choices, and the whole thing occasionally becomes a very expensive-looking soap opera. I still wanted to know what happened, and the final twist gave me more to think about than I expected.

Three stars feels right. I would have a harder time arguing that this is a very good movie than arguing that it is very entertaining.

Spoilers ahead, including the ending.

★ Entertainment

Dakota Johnson plays Lowen, a struggling author whose reading at Books & Books attracts basically nobody. Somebody’s phone goes off, too. That efficiently tells us how her career is going.

Then she sees a cyclist get absolutely creamed by a car and ends up covered in blood. Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett, helps her into a bathroom to clean up and gives her another shirt. Almost immediately, these strangers start exchanging their worst experiences. He talks about pulling his daughter out of a lake. She talks about her mother dying. Maybe this intimacy works better on the page, but onscreen it feels like two people speed-running their traumatic backstories in a bathroom.

Lowen learns that Jeremy is married to Verity, Anne Hathaway’s enormously successful author, who specializes in villains. Verity was badly injured in a car accident, and Lowen is offered a large amount of money to finish her series. Supposedly, Verity read her work and specifically wanted her. After that reading, I can see the appeal of an audience of one who actually likes your books.

Lowen goes to their house to sort through Verity’s notes. When she arrives, she looks at the frozen lake and asks whether it is a field. That really got me. Jeremy has already told her about pulling his daughter out of a lake. There is a lake right there. It has snow on it, but come on.

These moments kept pulling me out of the intended mood, but they also became part of the fun. The movie takes itself seriously enough that the absurdity has room to land.

★ Mystery

At the house, Verity appears almost catatonic. She cannot speak, a nurse cares for her, and Jeremy explains that her condition is why Lowen had to sign an NDA. Then Lowen finds a flash drive hidden inside a cigarette pack in Verity’s office. It contains an autobiography, which understandably becomes more interesting to her than the work she was hired to do.

The manuscript presents Verity as a villain herself. She writes about hating motherhood, ignoring her crying children, and dismissing Jeremy’s fears about things like SIDS. Eventually, she claims she deliberately tipped over the boat that caused one of their children to drown.

Meanwhile, Lowen grows closer to Jeremy and his son, and Verity becomes this lightly horror-coded presence in the house. Is she watching Lowen? Did she move? It never really becomes a horror movie, but those little suggestions work with the uncertainty surrounding the manuscript. We are reading this awful version of a person who is right there and apparently unable to explain herself.

The romantic and sexual flashbacks were my least favorite part. They have this glossy, Fifty Shades of Grey-ish quality that I found more awkward than erotic. Having Dakota Johnson reading her way through somebody else’s erotic melodrama adds another layer of unintentional comedy. This time she is outside it looking in.

Still, the central mystery kept me interested through the romance. I wanted to know what Verity had done and how much of her current condition was real. That was enough to keep the movie moving for me.

★ Ending

When Lowen tells Jeremy about the manuscript, he confronts Verity, who suddenly proves she can speak and insists it is not what they think. He starts choking her. Lowen tells him to stop, reminding him that he has a son and everyone will know he murdered his wife.

Then she pauses and essentially tells him he has to make it look like an accident.

One of my biggest laughs of the movie. The theater laughed, too. This should be a horrifying moral turning point, but the pause and melodrama make it land like a punchline. They kill Verity and dump her body in the lake.

After a time jump, Lowen is pregnant, she and Jeremy are together, and they are leaving the house. His son reveals a hiding place under the floorboards, where Lowen finds a letter from Verity. According to the letter, the autobiography was a writing exercise suggested by a therapist: write herself as the villain to better understand the villains in her fiction.

I liked this twist. I did not see it coming, and it means they may have murdered an innocent woman because they treated fiction as confession. Of course, Verity could also be lying in the letter. She tells stories professionally. Finding another thing she wrote does not automatically settle which version is true.

The final scene, basically a fake Hot Ones interview, makes the point pretty directly. Asked about the archetype she most enjoyed distorting, Lowen answers, “Truth.” A little cute, but I liked the idea. She has helped decide which story survives.

Final verdict

Three stars for Entertainment, Mystery, and Ending. Verity is frequently ridiculous, but I enjoyed following its mystery, laughing at its excesses, and finally having to reconsider what I had just watched. The uncertainty in that letter gives the ending a weight the bathroom trauma exchange did not exactly prepare me for.