Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“This is Verity. The doctors don’t think she will ever walk or talk again.”
The trailer for upcoming Hollywood thriller ‘Verity’, starring Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett, and Dakota Johnson, almost plays out like those silly TikTok/short-form videos mocking the thriller genre. You know, how it’s usually about twisted rich people acting out some version of themselves that isn’t actually real.
Hilariously, the ‘Verity’ trailer shows Anne Hathaway as a successful, wealthy author called Verity, who is confined to a wheelchair and in a near-vegetative state, so her partner (played by Josh Hartnett) ropes in someone else – Dakota Johnson’s character – to finish her latest book. And since Anne is a veggie, Dakota and Josh obviously start to have an affair in what looks like a pretty remote mansion.
But it turns out maybe Anne is only pretending to be a veggie, which means she might not be happy about her partner sleeping with another woman right under her nose, so she might want revenge. Or maybe she always had some ulterior motive in getting Dakota’s character involved in her affairs. Maybe Dakota was the plot twist she needed for her unfinished novel. Although a scene indicates that Verity already has her autobiography written and hidden in a folder, filled with secrets that seem to shock the ghostwriter. (Maybe the husband didn’t want these details out in the public?)
Basically, the trailer gives too much of the plot away. Although, since Verity is based on a ‘bestselling novel’, maybe whatever we see in the trailer is deliberately deceptive. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know. Also, filmmakers don’t even stick to a novel’s original premise anyway, making their own little tweaks, so that readers of the original are left surprised too (think ‘The Housemaid’). Although, everything about the Verity trailer screams like it’s a raunchy early 2000s movie. There’s a dated familiarity to it.
However, just because something looks it belong to the early 2000s, doesn’t mean it cannot be entertaining. Makes me think about how a friend who watched Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey‘ said ‘it’s a good film, but it feels like a good 2000s film.’ The subtext is – it’s good, but it could’ve been better.
So here’s hoping Verity turns out to be the kind of film that subverts viewer expectation and delivers more than what the teaser promises. Especially since it has an interesting cast. The film releases in theaters in October 2.
Watch the ‘Verity’ trailer on YouTube, it’s also embedded below.
