Verity (2026) review

Certainty isn’t always the wisest choice. I really enjoyed how the film constantly kept me second guessing myself. That uncertainty became the most engaging part of the experience for me. It reminded me of several thrillers I love, but it still managed to carve out its own identity. By the end, I was left thinking less about what happened and more about how easily certainty can be manipulated. ⚠️ Spoilers ahead. From here on, plot details are discussed. Read on if you’ve seen the film. If not, save this post and come back after. ⚠️ While Dakota Johnson’s character is reading Anne Hathaway’s character’s manuscript, it immediately reminded me of Teyana Taylor’s character in One Battle After Another (2025), where part of her postpartum struggle is becoming jealous of how much her husband loves their daughter more than her after she is born. It also kind of reminded me of Jennifer Lawrence’s character in Die My Love (2025), where she becomes so frustrated with their child. It also reminded me of Shutter Island (2010) because of the family killing and revenge aspect of the story. There were things that I felt I knew would happen, but I was never absolutely certain because there were not enough solid clues to confidently detect the truth. For example, I already suspected that it would work like an unreliable narrator story, but here, the unreliability is deliberate because the manuscript itself was intentionally written as part of a writing exercise. The disturbing story may have been deliberately manufactured as part of a writing exercise, which means the very evidence everyone is using to understand Verity may have been fictional from the beginning. Then there is the possibility that she was only pretending the entire time to protect someone else. It gave me The Housemaid (2025) vibes too. I predicted that Josh Hartnett’s character would be similar to Brandon Sklenar’s character, where there is clearly something more going on with him and he would eventually become involved with the new girl. Nice twist. It almost feels like Memento (2000), where a character believes something with absolute certainty, only for the story to reveal that they never truly knew what was real in the first place. The difference here is that even the seeds leading them toward that certainty were deliberately manufactured. So the twist is not simply, “You believed the wrong thing.” It is more like, “What if everything that made you certain was planted there specifically to make you certain?”