An assignment inside someone else's life
For Lowen Ashleigh, working on Verity Crawford's books is an opportunity with obvious professional value. Moving into the Crawford estate also removes the normal distance between a writer and the private life behind a public name. Lowen encounters a household, a marriage and a collection of written material whose meaning she has to decide for herself.
The discovery of apparently autobiographical pages creates the film's essential problem. A document can look like evidence while still raising questions about who wrote it, why it exists and how literally it should be read. Lowen's growing involvement with Jeremy Crawford makes those questions more difficult. Her interpretation of the material and her own desires cannot be kept comfortably separate.
The three central performances
Dakota Johnson plays Lowen, Anne Hathaway plays Verity and Josh Hartnett plays Jeremy. Ismael Cruz Córdova appears as Lowen's agent, Corey, while Brady Wagner plays Crew Crawford. Remembering those relationships is more useful than reading an extensive character history before watching, because the uncertainty between the three leads is central to the premise.
Michael Showalter directs from a screenplay credited to Nick Antosca. The source is Colleen Hoover's novel Verity. Readers have a clear point of comparison, but newcomers can follow the film without having read the book. Neither route requires knowing the eventual explanation of the manuscript before the story has presented its competing possibilities.
The kind of thriller to expect
The US R classification includes sexual content, nudity, violence, bloody images and language. This is therefore a romance-inflected psychological thriller for adults, with attraction functioning as part of the uncertainty rather than as a promise of a reassuring romantic destination.
For a shared film night, it offers a focused discussion about the difference between an account and a confession. Ask what makes each interpretation convincing at the moment it is offered, and whether personal investment changes that judgement. Detailed ending explainers are particularly likely to reduce the pleasure of forming your own suspicions, so leave those until after watching.
