The appetite for a genuinely good erotic mystery-thriller is real and documentable — The Housemaid proved it commercially, and the cozy-crime boom proves the adjacent demand. Verity arrives with the right ingredients on paper: a struggling writer hired to ghostwrite for a mega-selling author, a handsome and sensitive husband she shouldn't want, a beautiful damaged wife in a wheelchair who may be dangerous, a lakeside modernist villa in Vermont down whose corridors secrets multiply. The genre machinery is loaded. Then someone forgets to fire it. Dakota Johnson is doing exactly what she did in Fifty Shades — wide-eyed, quietly drawn, appealingly fragile — and she is good at it. This is not a criticism. The ingenue who wanders into a situation she cannot fully read is a perfectly honorable erotic-thriller function, and Johnson fills it with more intelligence than the script deserves. Josh Hartnett as the handsome husband Jeremy is warm and just ambiguous enough, which is all the role asks. The real question is Anne Hathaway's Verity: immobile, mute, possibly performing, possibly not. Hathaway does the work. The film doesn't match her. Nick Antosca's adaptation of Colleen Hoover's novel opens with a sequence that is genuinely good — kinetic, disorienting, with the right flavor of transgression. The cheeky hints of Daphne du Maurier and Brian De Palma in the early going are not imagined; they are there, and they are promising. The problem is that promise requires a third act to pay it off, and this film's third act does not pay off anything. It disintegrates into small substandard plot points that don't cohere, and then asks the audience to accept a lamely unresolved situation as sophisticated ambiguity. Ambiguity is a tool, not a substitute for resolution. The structural problem is mechanical: the film's entire engine runs on Lowen finding not one but two manuscripts, and the logic of why she doesn't simply ask anyone — the sinister nurse, a neighbor, a records office — how exactly Verity came to be in her current state is never addressed. The sinister nurse character (played by Irina Dvorovenko) appears, establishes menace, and then simply and bafflingly disappears. These are not nitpicks. They are the load-bearing walls of a mystery, and they are missing. What the film gets right is mood and desire — the specific texture of wanting someone you shouldn't, the particular unease of a beautiful house that isn't yours, the way secrets in old buildings feel architectural. These are real pleasures and they carry the film through its middle section. But mood is not mechanics. The erotic-thriller genre, at its functional best in De Palma or Verhoeven, delivers sensation and structure simultaneously — the plot IS the desire, the puzzle IS the seduction. When the plot collapses, the desire goes with it. Verity needed a new draft, and it knows it, and it releases you anyway.
