Movie review: ‘Verity’ feels all too familiar after ‘The Housemaid’

Writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) had been published, but she still could not find a strong enough market yet. One day, she was offered to ghostwrite for best-selling novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) who had been rendered invalid after a  accident. According to Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), he was looking for a writer whom Verity liked to finish her popular Noble Virtues series, written from the wicked point of the villains. 

This was the surprise hit over the weekend when it upended the big-budget film “Digger” starring Tom Cruise and wound up as the top film in the USA box office. Because of this, Anne Hathaway had now starred in three films that debuted at Number One on opening weekend this year, following “The Devil Meets Prada 2” and “The Odyssey.” I honestly had never even heard of this title at all before reading this startling piece of news last Monday. 

While I was watching this new film develop, the story being set up immediately brought to mind “The Housemaid” (2025). In that potboiler of a film, a pretty younger woman becomes the live-in maid for a wealthy family whose household hides dark secrets, which is essentially the same plot here. Both husbands were irresistibly handsome and solicitously kind, while both wives were mysterious, seemingly hiding dark skeletons in her closet. 

The wife in both films had a history of causing physical harm to their daughters, coincidentally both related to drowning. It was also no surprise when the conveniently conducive situation in both films led to the husbands falling in love with the younger woman, with them cavorting around his large house. Even the final twist about the real score between husband and wife also sounded very similar, it was just presented differently. “The Housemaid” did it better.

Dakota Johnson felt very much at home with the role of Lowen Ashleigh because it is reminiscent of mousy literature student Anastasia Steele, her breakthrough role in “Fifty Shades of Grey.” After a big 2001 with “Pearl Harbor” and “Black Hawk Down,” Josh Hartnett had no particularly high profile roles until he was pushing 50, starring in “Oppenheimer” (2023), “Trap” (2024), and now this one, in a role requiring him to go sexy. 

Anne Hathaway also broke through in 2001, with “The Princess Diaries,” and pretty much had a stellar career since then.  After tackling an Oscar-bait role in “The Odyssey” and running from dinosaurs in “The End of Oak Street,” her role here in “Verity” only had just sitting on her chair looking miserable most of this film. Yet during her flashback scenes, Hathaway infused her title character with a dark sort of energy that drove the mystery across.

This review was originally published in the author’s blog, “Fred Said.”