‘Verity’ movie review: Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson stumble through a corny thriller

You know how it is with adaptations. You are invited into a world without the stray pleasures of imagination as someone else reads between the lines for you. The personal ambiguity takes shape of a collective uniformity; what you are seeing is how one person read the book. That way, the twisted dynamics of Colleen Hoover ’s novel, Verity , seem to be forever at odds with the audio-visual sense of director Michael Showalter in the adaptation. While telling a story that is rooted in the idea of truth and its manipulation, Michael leads with a sensationalist reckoning, leaving little space for nuance in the tone as he infuses flashy visuals, jump-scary edit patterns and a nosy, The Shining meets Final Destination- type background score to the proceedings. As Jack Torrance would say, it’s all no work, no play.