A couple of months ago, when writing about The End of Oak Street, I mentioned that Anne Hathaway has a generational talent for delivering dialogue that is overwritten, overwrought, and trite. And she does! Alas, she seems to have finally met her match in Colleen Hoover. 

A young writer with the far-fetched name of Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) gets a call from her agent after an in-store reading that only a couple of people attend, letting her know about an opportunity that has arisen and advising her to appear for a meeting the following day. Walking to the appointment, Lowen narrowly misses being hit by a car, although an ill-fated bike messenger is not so lucky, and she ends up covered in his blood. A handsome bystander (Josh Hartnett) leads her away to get cleaned up and even gives her his shirt to replace her own ruined one. When she arrives to Hachette Publishing, Lowen learns that the man is Jeremy, husband to best-selling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), and that Verity’s publisher is seeking someone to ghost write the last three books in Verity’s ongoing series, per some unexplained tragedy that has befallen the Crawford family. Initially resistant, Lowen eventually accepts the job, and the invitation to stay at Verity’s home and work from her office there. Upon arrival, she meets Verity and Jeremy’s young son Crew, as well as Anna (Irina Dvorovenko), who is now nurse to the completely catatonic Verity. But all may not be as it seems . . .

I had a lot of fun watching this, but make no mistake, it is a bad movie. I was hoping that all of its negative reviews would prove to be untrue, that there would be something really enjoyable and noteworthy here, but I’m sorry to say that this was simply not good. I’ve never read any of Hoover’s books in their entirety, but I’ve read enough samples (and been subjected to enough trailers of adaptations of her films) to realize that I should have known better than to think this cast and this director would be able to make a good film out of her source material. I’m no stranger to Dakota Johnson’s acting, and in fact, I’m a fan. I gave Madame Web a 5-star review and forced my fellow podcasters to watch it so I would have someone to talk to about it. I’m so charmed by her that I was tricked into enjoying The Materialists, for goodness’s sake. Josh Hartnett’s career resurgence has been a source of delight for me, and I was also excited to see him and Hathaway on screen; they’re both great performers who rarely let me down, even in mediocre flicks. Unfortunately, Johnson’s charm only shines through in rare moments, Hartnett is stiff and wooden at the best of times and has zero chemistry with Johnson, and Hathaway is mostly reduced to reciting passages from her own (read: Hoover’s) work, which has less literary merit than the “1 gallon / 1.78 liters per flush” sticker on the urinal at the megaplex where I witnessed Verity in all of its “glory.”

Verity bears more than a passing resemblance to Hitchcock’s Rebecca; a working-class woman who has recently lost her mother is given the opportunity to live in a gorgeous, remote home with a man who is rich, charming, and handsome, and the film’s primary conflict revolves around a drowning that may be more than it seems. There are other borrowings from Hitch’s filmography as well, most tellingly in the superimposition of images over one another as in The Wrong Man and Spellbound, which run the gamut from somewhat inspired (Lowen puffs on her vape reading Verity’s work while Verity smokes a cigarette as she composes it) to absurd (a scene wherein Lowen looks out over the house’s view is poorly composited to look like she’s reflected in the glass rather than doing so in camera, for reasons I cannot fathom). Unlike the first Mrs. de Winter, Verity is still alive, but only in the most technical sense, and thus she haunts the house in a much more literal way than Rebecca did Manderly, but the connections are there. You can imagine my disappointment when the apparent Mrs. Danvers stand-in, Anna, ultimately ends up having very little to do with the plot; she doesn’t even do enough to function as a red herring. Instead, the narrative hinges on Lowen’s discovery of a concealed manuscript entitled So Be It, an autobiography in which Verity confesses that she was jealous of the portion of Jeremy’s affection that her twin children took from her, and that she despised them for it even before they were born. In it, Verity paints herself as a monstrous sociopath devoid of all but one recognizable human emotion (unquenchable lust for Jeremy) and admits to taking several criminal actions. Lowen briefly asks Jeremy how he and Verity met, and when it matches the manuscript, she believes everything else found within it, which leads her down a path where she begins to suspect that Verity may be feigning her incapacitation.

Reading a summary of the source novel indicates that there were some wise excisions and some baffling changes. In the novel, the Crawfords actually have two deceased children, while the film condenses these two characters down to a single dead daughter; that’s a smart choice to make this a cleaner narrative and makes the film less oriented toward a literary genre we might call “tragedy porn.” Other changes are less coherent. There’s a murder in both texts that the characters intend to make appear to be an accident, but the novel’s version will hold up to some scrutiny while the film’s will not (asphyxiation is unlikely to be confused for drowning by any medical examiner). I also get the feeling that Lowen’s mother’s passing is a more important plot element in the book, given that this would create more opportunities for her to connect Verity’s catatonia to her mother’s lingering illness in her mind, but I’m also not about to give the novel credit for cleverness in that regard, even without having read it. In this film, Lowen says that she “[doesn’t] read books you can buy at the airport,” which feels like a dig at Hoover’s own widespread, lowest common denominator of reader appeal, but we don’t get to hear or read enough of Lowen’s own work to see if she’s actually any more talented than Verity. Worse, the examples of Verity’s work that we get are virtually indistinguishable from Hoover excerpts I’ve seen. There’s a version of this story that might work, but not as written here.

Writers writing about writing is a cliché, but it’s also a forgivable one given that most academic compositional instruction directs students to “write what you know.” What’s unforgivable here, however, is that there’s a fundamental lack of curiosity about literature on display that hollows out a narrative that’s already basic and noncontemplative. We get very little idea of what drives Lowen’s own writing other than her pretentions about being better than airport novelists. She never talks about how her writing allowed her an outlet for her frustrations over having to care for her ailing mother or navigate the complexity of her emotions about said caretaking relationship. What little information we get about her, in her opening voiceover, indicates that she prefers living in a large city and the anonymity that provides over the nature of her small town, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but this doesn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny. How did she and her mother come to live in New York, then? Did she move to the city when she became an adult and then her mother moved in with her? We don’t get any clue about that, and at the end of the film she seems completely comfortable moving to a small town in North Carolina without even paying lip service to how her desires may have changed because of her time in the Crawford home. There’s a scene in which Lowen comes into the dining room while Jeremy is reading, and there’s a perfect opportunity for the two of them to have a conversation about the book, perhaps discussing its themes in a way that deepens one or both characters, but any chance that the narrative might comment on itself goes out of the window since we never even find out what book was in Jeremy’s hands. It’s a story in which the characters’ reading habits are irrelevant other than in the performance of being a reader. Verity wants you to know that it’s a story about literary people, but cares very little for what they might be ingesting or meditating on, what any given text might mean to them, or anything else that might give us an idea of their internal lives. I have no doubt that the source text was airport slop, and this film will end up being the same: suitable to put on a small screen on the back of an airplane seat to distract you for a couple of unchallenging hours between points A and B, and nothing more.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond