"Lowen" (Dakota Johnson) has just left a sparsely-attended book signing when her agent tells her she might have an opportunity to make some proper cash. That involves her doing a bit of collaboration with the well-established best-seller "Verity" (Anne Hathaway) who has become temporarily incapacitated. She's very anxious about taking on this responsibility, but the poorly author's husband "Jeremy" (Josh Hartnett) - with whom she'd already had an unfortunate encounter en-route to the meeting - convinces her to give it a go and to move in with them at their remote and luxurious Montana home. It's once she is there that she discovers just what is wrong with "Verity" and also a manuscript on a hidden flash drive that provides her with quite a ghastly narrative of the goings-on within this marriage. All the while she is finding herself increasingly drawn to "Jeremy" and their young son "Crew" (Brady Wagner) but the more of the unpublished story she reads, and the more she observes around her, the less she takes on face value and ultimately believes. Is any of this scenario actually real? Given she's barely been off the screen in 2026, it's not too surprising that Hathaway has chosen to spend almost all of her sparing appearances here either in bed or on a chair - she actually contributes really very little to an otherwise rather good-looking but plodding drama that has far too many predicatable tram-lines to follow. When Hartnett was younger and had something of the eye-candy to him, I could see why he was on screen but now he has aged into really quite a bland actor who brings virtually nothing original to his role. Even the usually more reliable, though hardly versatile, Johnson seems content to just go through the motions as we skip along to an denouement that is both rushed and, I felt, contrived to suggest there might be legs in "Verity II". It is trying to be a little more sophisticated a thriller, but sadly it's all just join-the-dots stuff that you may well have forgotten by the time you leave the foyer. I did like the house, though.
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