Verity is trashy fun without the fun. There’s a setup here that could naturally lead to soapy thrills and a guilty pleasure, but by the end you only feel guilt. Well, that and deep confusion thanks to the five-car pile-up of twists that doesn’t so much clarify as confounds. The premise: Anne Hathaway plays Verity, a name I’ve never heard before but TheBump.com tells me is #2771 for U.S. baby names, a popular thriller author known for getting deep into the minds of her villains. It’s been years since her last book and the world is in great anticipation, which is why her husband (Josh Hartnett) hires a promising novelist (Dakota Johnson) to serve as a ghost writer and help Verity finish the manuscript. The problem: Verity has been paralyzed and mute since a car accident that her husband has kept secret. But could she be faking? Could she be a monster? Could the sexy husband be a monster? Will Johnson be seduced by either member of this married couple? Too much of the movie is Johnson reading Verity’s manuscript with Hathaway’s narration telling us her biography, which isn’t that interesting until it seems like she might be scheming to murder her own kids. This is the kind of genre where it’s okay to cross over into cringe or camp, as long as it feels entertaining and the performers are in on the joke. Hathaway plays the best with the material, relishing every syllable of being a catty novelist known for tackling the psychology of bad people. The other actors feel adrift, and maybe that’s because the structure is so dominant toward Verity, even when she’s just supposed to be absolutely still. The question over whether Verity might be faking only leads to goofy options, and it only raises far more questions. Turning her into some jump scare phantom just leads to laughter. Also, one of the sillier twists involves a cascade of bad decisions, and unanswered follow-up questions, primped entirely by the reality that someone might just be a very convincing writer. Seriously, when this twist was revealed, I groaned so loud and slumped in my chair, and that feeling pervaded me, like when Johnson tries to fit her teeth into a headboard bite mark she believes belongs to Hathaway’s amorous jaw. What are we doing here? Just because Verity is the best Colleen Hoover movie yet is not the selling point one might believe.

Nate’s Grade: C