‘Verity’ ending explainer: What should audiences believe?

Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel Verity has been adapted into a star-studded movie, headlined by Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett, and Dakota Johnson. Together, this trio makes up a torrid love triangle defined as much by dark desires as by lies and manipulation. So, in the end, who are we meant to believe?

Mashable is going full spoilers. Proceed with caution.

What’s Verity about?

Verity centers on Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), a novelist who’s been published but largely overlooked. However, a life-changing career opportunity presents itself when a publisher asks her to ghostwrite three novels for best-selling novelist Verity Crawford (Hathaway), who writes all her books from the perspective of their villains. Part of the job entails traveling to the Crawford home, which is a remote cabin near a lake, to go through Verity’s office and files for notes on how the series should continue.

Why can’t Verity just send along notes? Following a car crash, Verity cannot walk or talk. So, her husband Jeremy (Hartnett) invites Lowen to stay with them and their young son Crew (Brady Wagner), while she goes through the notes. During her time in the cabin, Lowen not only begins to be enchanted by Verity’s home, child, and husband, but also uncovers a manuscript called So Be It. Written by Verity, this appears to be a memoir where the author confesses her darkest thoughts.

Spooked by this memoir, Lowen begins to suspect that Verity is not actually injured as she appears. Could she be sneaking around the house when no one’s looking? And to what end?

What’s in Verity’s memoir, So Be It?

Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

The story unfurled in the memoir begins with the night Verity met Jeremy at a party. She recounts how obsessed they became with each other, and how devastated she was when he would go off to work. So, she began to write a novel, filling her days with a fictional version of him named Lane.

According to So Be It, Jeremy is in awe of her when he reads the first novel. But outside the memoir, he tells Lowen that he never read another of his wife’s Noble Virtues books, because he didn’t like getting into her head like that. This is reflected in So Be It.

In the memoir, Verity equates his refusal to read her other work as a form of rejection. The more major blow, though, is how he loves their not-yet-born twins more than her. While pressing his face to her bulging belly, he says that his love for their children is unconditional, not like their love, which is “conditional.” Verity’s eyes well up as she says she loves Jeremy unconditionally, and he placatingly agrees. But here, a dark seed appears to be planted: the resentment of her children.

Other flashbacks show how Verity neglects her children, focusing instead on her own pleasures, like napping and writing novels. Over years, this selfishness festers to a murderous loathing of the kids, whom her husband loves more than her. So, she plots to drown them with a canoe ride in the lake — with no life vests.

Her son Crew survives, but her daughter Harper drowns. And to her dismay, this tragedy doesn’t send Jeremy back into her arms, but into a depressive funk. The manuscript’s title comes from her final confession, which begins with “So be it.” She plans to kill herself by driving into a tree.

Lowen reads this final section with shock, believing that this is exactly what happened leading up to Verity’s current circumstance. From there, she decides Verity is a villain, like the ones in her Noble Virtues novels, and so Lowen feels emboldened to steal the lifestyle that she feels Verity doesn’t “deserve.”

How does Verity end?

Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

Lowen turns the manuscript over to Jeremy. He reads the seeming confession and, in a fit of rage, kills Verity by suffocating her.

Far from a helpless witness, Lowen gives him advice on how to “make it look like an accident” so they can get away with murder, and start a new life together. After dumping the dead wife in the lake, the pair hook up, resulting in Lowen getting pregnant.

Seven months later, Lowen boasts a big, pregnant belly as Jeremy and his son Crew tidy up the cabin preparing to move somewhere else with her. It’s during the last look at the house that Crew reveals his secret hiding spot, where he’s been keeping his secret drawings — and where his mother hid a letter to Jeremy.

What’s in Verity’s hidden letter?

Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

Another version of Verity appears in the handwritten letter Lowen finds at the end of the film. Here, she tells Jeremy that if he’s found this letter, it means she and Crew are far away and safe.

In the letter, she says So Be It was not a confession but a coping method. The idea came years before from her publisher, who’d suggested getting into the mindset of a villain with a writing exercise of creating a diary about her everyday life with a “sinister” tone. Verity found this exercise helpful in writing her novels. Then, once Harper drowned, she used it as a way to explore her grief. She didn’t expect Jeremy to find it and believe it was true.

In the letter, she laments that he hadn’t read her writing in years. Why would he have looked at the open file on her computer? Why would he not give her a chance to explain? Instead, the letter alleges, Jeremy committed to fatal vengeance. He drugged her and put her in a vehicle, setting up to kill her through a car crash, just like in So Be It.

When she awoke from the crash, she decided to play being paralyzed until she could escape with Crew. Verity feared that if she told anyone what happened, Jeremy would turn over the memoir to the authorities as if it were a confession, and she might be arrested for Harper’s death and separated from her only surviving child.

Lowen reads this, horrified, gripping her pregnant belly. Did she kill an innocent woman to steal a wife-abusing murderer?

Which version of Verity is real?

Both Hoover’s novel and director Michael Showalter’s movie end with Lowen wondering which version of Verity is the true one. Notably, Verity’s name means truth. But let’s regard the clues. The first involves access.

In the film, Lowen finds the manuscript for So Be It in Verity’s desk, tucked away inside a packet of cigarettes on a jump drive. The manuscript, while seeming to confess to being a bad mother and a child murderer, is not password-protected.

By contrast, the handwritten letter, scribbled out across pages torn from a notebook, is hidden within the floorboards of the lake house, which no one but Crew knew was a hiding place.

The access to these items suggests the letter was the secret, while the memoir was something Verity didn’t think she needed to hide. An alternate reading could be that Jeremy, who gave Lowen full access to his wife’s office after liking her book, planted the jump drive where he thought she might find it. But the preserved pages under the floorboards suggest he didn’t know about the letter at all.

The second curious element of So Be It versus the letter is how Showalter depicts Verity in the flashbacks of each. For the memoir, she is always flawlessly groomed, her hair long and shining, draped over snug dresses or cashmere cardigans the color of fresh blood. Her skin is radiant. Her expressions are theatrically arch, recalling the psycho-biddy theatrics of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. And to that end, from her bold red lips comes an accent that is vaguely Transatlantic, emphasizing that Verity as a villain is a larger-than-life character, enhanced by Lowen’s fantasy.

By contrast, the Verity shown in the letter’s flashbacks is far less fantastical. Verity’s skin is blotchy. Her eyes aren’t sharp but clouded with tears. Her mouth is not a painted smile, but a pained frown of grief. This Verity looks more like the version Lowen saw around the house, stripped of her veneer of glamour and impenetrability.

Then there’s one little moment that feels like a tipping point into which version of Verity rings most true.

Once Lowen reveals to Jeremy the memoir manuscript, he barrels into the bedroom bellowing at Verity, demanding to know if she’s faking her infirmity. At first, she’s still and stoic, as she was when Lowen tested her by stabbing her palm with a pushpin. But then, her facade cracks. She puts out an open palm toward her husband in a gesture of pause, and begs him not to hurt her. He then throttles her.

This simple, panicked request reflects the Verity of the still-undiscovered letter, which would accuse her husband of attacking her and trying to murder her because he believed she’d killed their daughter. She doesn’t smirk or seduce to wiggle her way out of this conflict; she begs for mercy. That doesn’t seem in like with the So Be It Verity. It seems the fearful reaction of a woman who knows exactly how dangerous the man in her life is.

Of course, the truth could lie somewhere in between. And for Lowen, believing the truth is more complicated might be the only way she can sleep at night… especially sharing a bed with Jeremy.

Verity is now in theaters.