Last night, I did another shift as theater projectionist, and sat through the movie Verity a second time. We had another evening of light duty, as only 4 people showed up, and two of them had free passes, so I sat through the whole thing.
It was so much worse than I thought. This was an incompetent piece of film making.
I was criticized in my original review for saying that Dakota Johnson can’t act, and that she spent “the entire movie looking vaguely stunned,” but that was a plot point that was mentioned multiple times! The opening (and entirely superfluous and irrelevant to the plot) scene was Johnson getting splashed with blood from an auto accident in front of her, to which she responded with complete equanimity. She later tells Josh Hartnett that she’s been told she has “resting bored face”. She responds to every horrific thing in the movie with utter passivity.
But the worst is the plot, and I’ll have to give away spoilers here, so it’s below the fold.
In the movie, Dakota Johnson is hired to ghost-write for a famous author, Anne Hathaway, who has been in a terrible accident and is mostly paralyzed, unresponsive, and silent. She spends almost the entire movie in a wheelchair, still and static (I’m sure Dakota Johnson would have been better in this role.) She left behind a secret autobiography in which she confesses to have killed one of her children, and Johnson suspects she has been faking the paralysis.
She puts a child monitor in Hathaway’s room to get evidence that she’s pretending…but she doesn’t get any. Hathaway is immobile and unmoving the whole time, even when Johnson punctures her hand with a pin. But Johnson shows Josh Hartnett the monitor, where she’s doing nothing, and accuses her of being a big bad murderous fake, and he flies into a rage and runs into Hathaway’s room screaming.
So what does she do? She instantly gives up the game, and starts pleading, so Hartnett starts strangling her. Johnson tells him to stop, that the police will know she was murdered, and suggests he cover her mouth and nose instead and suffocate her. Because the police can’t detect that. So he murders her.
Then they carry the dead, formerly paralyzed woman down to a lake and throw her body in, so the police will think she went for a walk and fell in. Very convincing.
There’s a second twist where it’s revealed that Hathaway’s autobiography was actually practice for a novel about a villain, and Hartnett was actually the one responsible for the death of his child, but Johnson marries him anyway. He’s rich.
This movie should win a prize for dumbest plot of the year, and deadest, dullest acting of the decade. No wonder no one has been showing up at the theater for this stinker.
If no one shows do you actually have to press play on the film? There has to be a nonzero electrical cost to the theater for playing a movie to an empty theater.
It sounds as though a dramatization of Irene Iddesleigh would be better. At least you’d get a few laughs. Yes, I have read the whole thing!
If no one shows up, we just shut it down. Last night we had 4 people, and if even 1 shows up, we go ahead and press the button.
It doesn’t take a lot to offset the electrical cost. Those 4 people spent about $80 on concessions. Building maintenance costs are the big drain, and those are there whether we run a movie or not.
I suggest a new film version where we learn that she is actually an android, explaining her indifference to the events. The dead woman was suspicious and wanted to do a Vought-Kampff test, so she had to die. The rest was just something the android made up.
Or we can make a fundamentalist christian version – they are always very low budget with crap actors, so no one will have high expectations. The killers were of course filthy atheists.
Finally, we can make a version “Verity + Waiting For Godot”. Noting happens.
I just realised, the film sounds like a failed attempt to imitate those seventies Italian giallo movies.
But those at least had competent actors, and sometimes decent mood and scenery.
As I think it happened Colleen Hoover blew up on TikTok and became so huge they began making movies based upon her novels. Not sure if the negative experience PZ had was because the source material or translation into film or both. At least this one didn’t have the horrific legal drama between actors It Ends with Us did. Yipes. Hoover books into movies didn’t end with that one so there may be more PZ has to endure down the road.
Dakota Johnson starred in another book to movie phenomenon where the author blew up BDSM themes, so maybe she’s been seen as a go-to books to movie person.
Her dad starred in a novella to movie called A Boy and His Dog. For some reason I just had to watch that messed up thing and wow! Never again.
Colleen Hoover writes awful books, in which abusive relationships are supposed to be romantic. Not sure whose bright idea it was to start turning them into movies.
I know I said this on your other review, but I really do think The Housemaid is the better take on the “down-on-her-luck lady goes to work for a rich family with dark secrets” plot. Amanda Seyfried’s excellent performance as a basket-case housewife is worth the price of admission. And the twist is way more exciting!
That’s kinda weird, because one of my favourite Josh Hartnett films is Lucky Number Slevin, where Hartnett plays a character “with ataraxia”, described as “a condition characcterised by freedom from worry or any other preoccupation” – which basically means he gets to be unfazed by being mugged, or kidnapped by gangsters, or by the cops. But it’s a really fun character because he gets to be nonchalantly snarky and quippy in the face of people trying to intimidate him, with an in-universe justification. The script and Hartnett make it work.
So it seems a bit of an odd coincidence that he’d be in another movie with a similar conceit, but where it fell completely flat.