Colleen Hoover built a legion of devoted readers on emotionally raw romance, but Verity was always the outlier — a book that her own fanbase described as difficult to read in the best possible way. It’s a psychological thriller with a moral trap built into its structure, a story that forces you to decide what you believe about a woman who may or may not be a monster. The film adaptation, now in theaters, understands the assignment completely.

The premise is precise and deliberately uncomfortable. Lowen Ashby, a struggling writer deep in debt, accepts a lucrative job finishing the remaining books in a bestselling thriller series after its author, Verity Crawford, is left incapacitated following an accident. Lowen travels to the Crawford home to sort through Verity’s notes — and finds a manuscript. An autobiography. One that describes, in vivid and clinical detail, acts of violence so disturbing that Lowen doesn’t know whether she’s reading the truth or the darkest fiction she’s ever encountered.

What the film gets right is exactly what the book got right: the ambiguity is the point. The script never winks at the audience. It presents Verity as both sympathetic and monstrous, sometimes simultaneously, and trusts viewers to sit with that discomfort rather than resolving it cleanly. The result is a film that lingers in a way most thrillers don’t, not because of what it reveals but because of what it refuses to.

The lead performance is exceptional. The actor playing Lowen navigates a character who is both observer and participant, unreliable in her own right, drawn to a situation she knows she should leave. There is real chemistry in the scenes she shares with the man at the center of the story, and the tension between desire and self-preservation gives those sequences a specific kind of dread.

The Crawford house itself functions as a supporting character — claustrophobic and beautiful, full of silence and bad history. Production design earns its place here. So does a score that knows when to step back and let a scene breathe.

The ending will divide audiences, as it divided readers. That’s the point. Verity isn’t interested in giving you peace. It’s interested in making you complicit — in the story Lowen tells herself, in the choices she makes, in what you decide to believe when the credits roll. Rating: 8/10