'Verity' movie cuts a major character from Colleen Hoover's twisty psychological thriller - USA Today
Spoiler alert: This story contains major plot reveals for the book and movie adaptation of “Verity.” Seriously, stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens.
BookTok's most anticipated Colleen Hoover adaptation has hit the big screen.
“Verity” is the author’s fourth Hollywood adaptation since her early BookTok explosion, following the controversy riddled “It Ends With Us” and the quieter “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him.” "Verity" is her twistiest book, a departure from her typical romantic dramas.
In “Verity,” out now in theaters, Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer who is about to score the biggest paycheck of her career ghostwriting for famous author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), left incapacitated after an accident. When she moves to the Crawford house to go through Verity’s files, she finds herself unexpectedly drawn to Verity’s grief-stricken husband (Josh Hartnett).
The movie largely captures the sinister secrets and betrayals of Hoover’s novel, it makes one major change.
Director Michael Showalter made a major change in cutting down the number of Crawford children.
In the book, when Lowen arrives at the Crawford house, it’s not just in the midst of Verity’s accident. The Crawford family has also recently lost both their twin daughters. Their daughter Chastin died from an allergic reaction to peanuts at a sleepover. Six months later, Harper died in a boating accident.
In searching through Verity’s office, Lowen finds a manuscript of what appears to be a memoir – and a confession. In it, Verity admits that she was jealous of her husband’s affection for the girls but liked Chastin more than Harper. She blamed Harper for Chastin’s death because the two were together at the sleepover when it happened. Verity then deliberately took Harper and her younger son Crew out on a boat and tipped it, only saving Crew and leaving Harper to drown.
But the movie erases Chastin as a character entirely, perhaps to minimize the amount of freak accidents in one family. The Crawfords instead had two kids, and Harper and Crew are the twins. Verity still resents her kids for taking her husband’s attention away, and she planned to murder both of them on the boat that day. Crew, who could swim, survived. Harper did not.
This change marks a major departure in Verity’s motivations as a character. In the book, though Verity tried several times to self-abort her twins when she was pregnant, she did love Chastin after she was born, so much so that she neglected Harper. In the movie adaptation, Verity has no love for either of her kids, attempting to murder them as early as infancy by smuggling them with a pillow.
Longtime “Verity” readers will be pleased to know the movie keeps its head-scratching twist. The true nature of the letter is the story’s ambiguous ending – was it really a writing exercise in which Verity coped with her children’s death by fictionalizing herself as the villain? Is Jeremy to blame, and was she actually waiting to escape with Crew to safety? Or was it a confession after all?
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, covering buzzy releases, chatting with authors and diving into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.
