Pop Culture Happy Hour - Verity

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

Verity stars Dakota Johnson as a struggling novelist who gets an unusual assignment. She's been asked to ghostwrite the final books by a superstar writer, played by Anne Hathaway. It’s an erotic thriller about marriage, manipulators, and (of course) murder. Based on Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, Verity is a story of deceit that wants you to keep guessing until the very end, and maybe even after that.Looking for more books adapted for the screen? Check out these episodes:"Wuthering Heights" is rude, moody and broody'No Other Choice' is the perfect movie for our moment'Little Women' Is A Dynamic Sister ActConnect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Public media is a rare space built entirely around curiosity, community, and great storytelling. To keep this vital resource thriving for everyone, join NPR Plus. You'll protect independent journalism and enjoy perks like bonus episodes and more. Keep public media going today at plus.npr.org. The headboard of the bed. Oh, this is hard, dodge. The headboard is key. It is a moment that I think you can get away with on the page.

But when you put it literally on camera, it becomes incredibly silly. The best-selling novel, Verity, is an erotic thriller about marriage, manipulators, and, of course, murder. And now it's a new movie. Verity's led by Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway, and it's a story of deceit that wants you to keep guessing until the very end. And maybe even after that. I'm Aisha Harris. And I'm Linda Holmes. And joining us today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour,

is Jordan Cruciola. She's the editor of the action movie newsletter, The Action Desk. Hey, Jordan. Welcome back. Hello. Thank you for having me. And I dare say I am a perfect third share for today's conversation. Very nice. Very nice. All right. Verity is based on the novel by Colleen Hoover, who you might know from either her many, many bestsellers or her previous film and TV adaptations. They include, of course, the not at all controversial. It ends with us. us. Here, the story concerns Loen Ashley, played by Dakota Johnson, a struggling novelist who gets the unusual assignment of ghost writing, the final books in a series by a superstar writer. That writer named Verity Crawford is played by Anne Hathaway. Verity has suffered serious injuries in a car accident that make it impossible for her to finish the books herself and even to communicate with anyone, although her near catatonic state is being kept quiet. Josh Hartnett

plays Verity's husband Jeremy. He's caring for her and their young son in their creepy mountain home. He brings Loewen there so she can read all of Verity's notes and drafts and outlines, but as Loan starts going through Verity's stuff, she finds an unusual manuscript that seems to be more of a journal than a novel. And as we see parts of Verity's life and flashbacks, Loan starts to wonder exactly what she doesn't know about these people. The film is directed by Michael. Michael Schoalter, whose diverse resume includes everything from Wet Hot American Summer to the Hathaway starring romance, The Idea of You. The film is from Amazon MGM Studios, so we should note Amazon supports NPR and pays to distribute some of our content. Verity is in theaters now. Jordan Cruciola,

I'm going to start with you. How did you like Verity? I am a big fan of Verity. And the way Verity kicks off within five minutes of the movie, as is referenced in the conversation just before we started recording, perhaps the most grotesque meet, cute of all time between Lo and Ashley and Jeremy, Josh Hartnett and Dakota Johnson. Really, that's a tone setting moment. And then we are just off to the races from there. And I was flying. I was flying this whole time, guys. I'm all in for Now, see, this is the interesting thing because I know Jordan well enough to know that Jordan likes a big movie. Jordan likes a movie that swings real, real hard and goes real, real big. Please refer back to Jordan and my conversation about the front room.

I'm going to call it one of the great pop culture happy hour episodes of all time is what I'm going to call that. Which we both treasure to this day, starring Brandy. Just find the front room, find the episode. Jordan likes a big movie. Yeah. I think I actually wanted this movie to be bigger. And I think that's a great instinct. Yeah.

I could have gone for bigger. I could have gone for crazier. Yeah. How about you, Aisha? What did you think? Oh, well, before every Dakota Johnson movie I see now, I think to myself, is she going to act in this one? Maybe. I love her.

I love her, Your Honor. And the answer has consistently been shrug. Maybe, maybe not. I look at her as the dual lepa of millennial leading ladies. She gives us next to nothing. And this movie even references the fact that she gives us next to nothing multiple times. At one point, Jeremy says to Lohen, I don't know if you're calm or in shock after that very grotesque, me, cute. Sure.

Yeah. Like, that can happen. That's a normal reaction to having someone get plastered by a car on a bike and blood is all over you in the first few minutes of this movie. That's normal. But then later on, he comments again. And she says, I have rest. board face. And I'm like, yes, you do. For a movie character, that's a little bit of a problem. That is a problem. And so, like, this movie is so sleepy for the first, I don't know, 20 minutes of

this movie before Anne Hathaway's character really kicks in and, like, brings some life into this story. This movie should be bigger. It should be campier. It should be way more in the realm of something like The House Made. Yes. And I'm not saying Sidney is that much better of an actress. But like, I think at least Sidney Sweeney kind of knew what kind of movie she was in. I think she's weirder. I think she goes bigger. Yeah, she loves big. She's good and big. She doesn't have holdback in her in a genre movie. Correct. And look, this is a kind of different character. Loen is a little different character. But like, I kept thinking to myself, like, who does disaffected deadpan way more effectively than Dakota Johnson? And I kept coming back to Aubrey Plaza.

Aubrey Plaza should have been in this movie. It would have been a little bit more interesting. I think she would have leaned more into Showalter's brand of camp. There's also issues with the script and the pacing. Like, I don't think it's all in Dakota Johnson, but she's not helping. Yeah. And so I found this movie to be, like,

frustratingly, just not fun enough. I can go past all the kind of ludicrous machinations and the silliness. Like, I actually wanted that, and I wanted more of that. And this movie was not doing that. I have not read the book.

So I don't know how closely it hues to the book. As I understand it, it hues very close to the book. However, I have not read the book. I've sort of looked over the book, which is sometimes something I do. I compare some sections to try to get a feel, right? But the women who sat next to me at the screening of this movie are huge fans of the book. Oh, great. And pronounced the movie cheesy.

Okay. Good to know. And we talked about things like there is a moment in this story that involves the headboard of the bed. Oh, this is hard, Josh. The headboard is key. It is a moment that I think you can get away with on the page. But when you put it literally on camera, it becomes incredibly silly, which is very common with things that involve sex scenes. Sure.

There are things that if you write them in a book, they play one way. If you force an actor to actually say or do that thing on camera, it becomes silly. Or if not handled perfectly, it becomes silly. And I think for me, I will say to Cody Johnson, I think I share some of Aisha's kind of general lack of response to her, like inability to respond to her. But I think she always comes off fundamentally as a normie. I think in the kinds of roles that she's doing now, she always seems to me like this kind of simple, minimally emotional person who startles herself with these little moments. of maybe transgressiveness or something like that were darkness, but then always kind of retreats back to this like very basic kind of presentation.

And I think if you've seen Anne Hathaway in a variety of things, right, and you've seen Josh Hartnett during the Josh Hartnett Renaissance, trapped. He has done such fabulous odd duck work. Yes. In the bear, in the wonderful fight or flight, my beloved fight or flight, and in Trap, which is the M. Night Shyamalan movie, where he is so strange in such a jangled, unsettling kind of really like semi-goofy kind of way.

Yeah. Like I feel like Hathaway and Hartnett are 100% capable of doing a much weirder and more satisfying version of this movie. I don't know if that's real. I mean, Showalter obviously can do that in comedy, right? with Wet Hot American Summer and stuff like that. I'm not sure he found that gear to direct this as an over-the-top kind of gothic, campy, do you know what I mean?

Like, the screenplay is from Nick Antosca, who's, I know him mostly from TV. I'm so glad you shouted him out because I just want to give it up for Nick Antoska, creator of brand new Cherry Flavor, creator of the best horror series television has ever seen in Channel Zero. this guy, one of our great screenwriters. See, you love this guy. Love this guy. I associate this guy with stuff like the TV adaptation of Cape Fear, which I thought was lousy, really not good. Oh, yeah.

It was really fun watching people watch that on Twitter and be like, what is going on at Apple TV? Well, and here's the thing. I think that had the same problem. I think he had trouble trying to execute the over-the-top campy-ne of something like Cape Fear. Okay. So I'm not sure either one of these guys really found the right gear for this movie. I would maybe have involved a woman, maybe, either to direct it or write the screenplay.

Yeah. I mean, obviously it comes from Colleen Hover's book. And, you know, I believe Anne Halfway and Dakota Johnson are both producers. And it's not that there were no women involved. But, like, I might have chosen a woman director or I might have chosen a woman to write the screenplay and see if that gets you anything different. But I felt like they have. had a lot of trouble kind of plugging into what I thought was the optimal version of this story, which is something a lot weirder than what we got. I feel like the movie that we did get

versus the one that is like house made loud, taking like big features of Amanda Safe Reed loud and big features of Sidney's Sweetie Loud and all the stuff that's going on in that. Dakota Johnson, my beloved, inscrutable heroin. Dakota Johnson in an environment where her her sort of elusive strangeness, but beauty, is meant to be this thing where you can't figure out the movie necessarily because you can't figure out what she's doing. I think that is a feature of Dakota Johnson and not a bug. That is why the 50 Shades movies, I'm not saying that they are good movies. I'm saying for what they are, they have this oddity about them where it's like, let's put, I think that the sense of her is like this like, she like is this insertion. Normie into a spectacularly strained situation where anybody else would go in and have a larger

emotional response and be like, this is really insane. Do you understand how insane this is? Is her just walking in and being like, uh-oh? And that's why Madam Wed is modern performance art, because you have her at the helm of Madam Webb. And I think that is the strange magic of Dakota Johnson that I think fits really well in this. Then you have Anne who is making, probably generating probably more money at the box office this year than any other person. Devil Wear's prodigy, Odyssey, this, my cherished Mother Mary,

somehow inexplicably styled as a 1950s housewife, despite the contemporary setting this way. Every time you see her, she has the hair of, like, a woman who's going to sell you a toaster in the mid-century,

like in the era of Eisenhower. She is serving so much Anne Hathaway face in this movie, just that like kind of closed eyes with like the kind of tense lip that's like slightly agape. And Josh Hartnett is just like the dreamiest husband man

where because the nature of the story you have to keep wondering, like, is he a bad guy? Is she a bad lady? Is Anne Hathaway marionetting this all catatonic? I was wrapped by everybody doing their individual job in this week that I think perfectly serves the mild, yes, it's a muted zaniness that this story possesses. I am almost persuaded by your enthusiasm, Jordan. My greatest weapon. I am the antithesis of Dakota Johnson, truly. But actually, I admire that you're able to get so much of that out of Dakota Johnson's performance. I'm all in, I'm a long time. I bought stock way back in her sitcom days because the intentional

funniness of Dakota Johnson, I'm also very sold on. So, like, I think people think that Dakota is, doesn't mean to make things funny the way she does. I think it's like, consider, it seems to read for a lot of people is like her just messing something up, so they're laughing at or not with her. But there's one thing Dakota is going to deliver. It is a wry comedy line in the completely inappropriate space in time in a movie. Yeah, I will say she has like one line in here that like, I can't repeat because it's NPR and we can't use that word, which I think is like the best line delivery out of her in that entire movie. But I think, again, this comes back to, and aside from my feelings about her, I don't

think it's just her. I do think, as Linda was saying, it is an issue with the scripting and the pacing and like the way this movie is overall concedes because. Yeah, I can absolutely get down with somebody being like, the pacing just wasn't there for me. I hear that. I hear that. I accept that. Because what I think of something like 50 Shades and look, I have not gone back to rewatch

those movies, but I remember seeing them in theaters and the camp, high level to the camp were off the charts. And like, she seemed to play into that in a really good way. It's funny because at my screening, like, there were obvious Colleen Hoover fans. There were lines. People were very excited to get in. And our screening was very muted. And I think that says something because I think this movie was supposed to be a housemaid situation. And my housemaid screening was very, like, vocal. Even something like, Baby Girl. Remember Baby Girl? The discourse around that with Nicole Kidman and those are the types of experiences that, like, I enjoy. I don't need this to be Shakespeare. I just want it to be

silly and absurd. And I don't think Dakota Johnson, like, she actually has said when talking about making this movie that, like, Showalter was trying to push her in the direction of camp. She's like, that's not really me as an artist. And I'm like, you don't say. I can tell. Michael, what were you doing? Yeah. That's a user error at that point. Like, sorry, you bought the car. Now you're going to drive it, Michael. I think she could be funny.

I just think so often she's usually funny in interviews. Like, I still think of the Ellen interview. Like, she's great at that. But, like, that doesn't serve as creating a character in this world and in making me want to, like, even Josh Hartney didn't have much to do. Like, for me at least, compared to other movies I've seen him in, he didn't have as much to do. Sure. This was Anne Hathaway's movie, and I agree with you.

Anne Hathaway is fantastic. She's got range and she has more to do, like her eyes are doing more in her catatonic state. Can anybody act harder in a voiceover than Anne Hathaway? I don't know. My goodness gracious. Yeah. We'll have much more about Verity after the break. So here's the other thing that I want to talk about.

And I don't want to spoil any specifics of the ending. But I do want to say one of the fundamental features of this book and movie is that it has, this ambiguous ending. Right. Anybody who reads a lot of domestic thrillers, which I do, is going to be asking themselves exactly the questions that Jordan was talking about. Is Verity bad? Is Jeremy bad? Are they both bad? Is neither one of them bad? The decision that Colleen Hoover made at the end of the book when she published it was basically, who knows? Right exactly like that by Anne Hathaway. Who knows? And it's obviously her name. is Verdi. So the whole thing is about truth and the manipulation of the truth. I generally dislike

ambiguous endings unless you have a really good reason for it. And particularly in a genre movie, like a thriller, there is a contract that you make with the audience. And I believe that the contract that you make with the audience requires that you answer the questions that you have asked. And I think when a thriller is setting you up to think maybe one person is bad, maybe another person is bad, for the writer to say, I choose not to choose, I greatly dislike that and I don't think it works well. And I think it denies, I mean, obviously, there is a climactic sequence of this movie that is in a sense, yes, it is over the top. But it has to be kind of hemmed in by the fact that you still have to leave room for the different interpretations that she wants to be possible. So you don't get Josh Hartnett in Trap or Josh Hartnett in some of these other things because you have to be unsure how to feel about him, not just throughout the movie where obviously that's what's going to happen.

Sure. Right. All the way through, right? I think it really takes away from the force of the story to eventually be like, I think the only time that an ambiguous ending works for me is when the purpose of the ambiguity is to raise the question, maybe it doesn't matter. That's why you get an ambiguous ending like the closing shots of Inception, for example, with the spinning top. Because the question is, does it matter whether the top is going to tip over or not? And that's an ambiguous ending that works for me

versus an ambiguous ending that to me feels more like a gimmick to me. This one feels like a gimmick. to me. This one feels like it's very, it's a have your cake and eat it too ending for, it feels like our authoress, Colleen. At the same time though, I actually kind of was, I've watched my fair share of these domestic thrillers. So you always think

like, oh, I'm already two steps ahead of you, writer, like I have a feeling. And when the ending was revealed, I was like kind of impressed by how silly it was and like how boldly just nonsensical it felt. But at the same time, I was like, well, actually, and I don't think this is a spoiler, but like, maybe

everyone is bad. Well, for sure. Of course. Regardless of what the real, quote unquote, truth is, all of them made some sort of choices that are like bonkers and absolutely maniacal. And, but again, this also just comes back to not just the way that's, the twist happens, but also the fact that, like, Dakota Johnson's character has to make a kind of, like, big turn. Like, her goals or what she wants, that just feels kind of. out of left field because it doesn't build to that both in the writing in a way that I think is, like, believable and in her performance. And I'll tell you what, when I decided that I was going to check the book out, just to, like,

get a feel for it, read some sections, get a feel for what the prose feels like. I learned that after it was published and after it already had many, many, many fans, a bonus chapter slash epilogue was added. Oh, an encore? What is she a pop star now? adding extra tracks. Which tells you essentially the answer to the question that you've been asking that was left hanging at the end of the book and is left hanging at the end of the movie. I better get a Blu-ray extra for this. So I had the ambiguous ending and I also resolved the

end. It's like, okay. I want to ask one brief bonus question. This is sort of an erotic thriller. Did you think this movie was sexy at all? Because I felt like, although they try to show some sex. I feel like this movie is obsessed with the idea that showing people's fingers and mouths is sexy. There's a moment where Dakota Johnson's character stirs her coffee with her finger and then sticks it in her mouth. And I was like, there's a spoon in this kitchen somewhere. I feel like it's meant to just be like everything is so sensual and people are constantly like there's a lot of biting and there's a lot of bleeding and there's a lot of people's mouths and lips and smearing icing on each other. And it all felt so effortful to me. And I just

didn't in the end, didn't think it was sexy at all. No, if only if you ask robots to make sexy and the robots were like, I've seen sexy happen and then they give you a recreation of what sexy is supposed to be. It's a bunch of sexy people who together to me in this context are not a chemistry of sexy. That wasn't the kind of chemistry I was getting from this movie. Yeah, I mean, to its credit, we do actually get sex scenes unlike some directors and movies. But this definitely does give the, one of the main sequences that occurs where like the Loing character, Dakota Johnson's character, is like imagining a sexual encounter. It was kind of vertigoish. It was like supposed to be sort of dark and twisty and unpleasant, but then also clearly kind of hot.

And was it hot? I don't know, not to me, but I could see some people thinking, oh, like she's in a bath. The kind of bath you would see at like a spa or like a hot spring. This house is very wild. And I, the funniest thing to me about that sequence that you're talking about, Aisha, is that at first it seems like she is having this fantasy while we will say, relaxing in the tub. Yeah. But then the fantasy comes to a certain climactic point. And she wakes up in bed, like she's waking up from a bad dream.

And I was like, was she dreaming that she was fantasized. I think she was also dreaming. She was in the tub while dreaming. It was a dream within a dream. The fantasy where suddenly the toward climax, the unmotivated red lighting appears. And I was like, oh, yeah, let's get an unmotivated club lighting in this fantasy. Absolutely. That was where I was thinking of vertigo.

I was like, oh, this is like when you have the close of James Stewart's face. And it's turning from like red, yellow. blue to create. But truthfully, like I will say, like, that all sounds kind of big and over the top. And I think if it had been more like that, it might have worked better for me. It's all of the kind of people walking around a well-appointed kitchen having conversations. That's all the part that I thought was very, was quite boring. And never start a really campy movie with like a scene in a conference room.

Don't get to the conference room too early. Anyway. Don't get to the conference room too early. I think we have some mixed feelings about this movie. movie, some mixed feelings about Dakota Johnson, but, you know, it is based on a very popular book. So if you go see it, you will probably run into plenty of people who are interested in it. That brings us to the end of our show. Jordan Cruciola, Aisha Harris.

Thank you so much for being here. It was very, very entertaining. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Linda. This episode is produced by Hopsafothamah, Liz Metzger, and Mike Katzif. And it was edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture.

Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we will see you all next time.