Verity: The Trouble with Being Certain
Spoiler Warning: This article discusses the film’s themes and closing line.
In Verity, Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to continue the successful novel series of Verity Crawford, played by Anne Hathaway, after a serious accident leaves her apparently unable to work. Moving into the Crawford family home, Lowen discovers a manuscript that appears to reveal disturbing truths about Verity’s life. Her growing attraction to Verity’s husband, Jeremy, makes the task of deciding whom to believe even more complicated. Directed by Michael Showalter, with a screenplay by Nick Antosca, the film adapts Colleen Hoover’s 2018 novel into a psychological thriller in which reading someone’s words offers little reassurance that we understand them.
I work in mental health research at King’s College London, with a particular interest in how the arts affect our minds and bodies. Films often leave me thinking about questions that extend well beyond the story on screen.
Verity raises disturbing questions about the deaths of children, deliberate harm and suspicion within a family. But the question that followed me out of the cinema was broader, and rather more uncomfortable: can we ever be certain?
Certain about what happened. Certain about another person’s intentions. Certain that the story we have accepted is the right one.
The title itself invites this question. Verity means truth. Yet the film repeatedly unsettles our confidence that we have found it. A written account seems to promise privileged access to another person’s mind. Surely something so intimate, so disturbing, must be authentic? But writing can confess, invent, conceal, or persuade. What looks like evidence still requires interpretation.
Lowen’s difficulty gradually becomes ours. When another version of events emerges, even the parents’ reactions to their daughter’s death take on different meanings. What I had initially accepted as understandable, or disturbing, begins to look less certain.
We are trying to understand events while becoming emotionally invested in a particular explanation. I found myself wondering how much my judgement depended on what I had actually seen, and how much depended on whom I wanted to believe.
That is an unsettling question to take into ordinary life.
Lowen’s growing attraction to Jeremy gives that question an immediate urgency: how well does she really know the person she is beginning to trust?
Most relationships depend on the belief that the person beside us is broadly who we understand them to be. We know their habits, recognise their expressions, and feel able to predict what they will say. Familiarity can make another person seem entirely knowable.
But nobody has complete access to somebody else’s inner life. There may be experiences they have never shared, feelings they cannot explain, or parts of their past that remain painful. Some things are deliberately concealed; others have simply never been spoken about.
It is easy to let a thriller turn that ordinary incompleteness into a sinister possibility. How many people are hiding something? What family secrets sit behind apparently unremarkable lives? But having a private inner life does not, in itself, amount to deception. Trust would become impossible if it required complete disclosure of every thought.
Families also carry different accounts of the same events. One sibling may describe a childhood as happy; another may remember feeling frightened or overlooked. A parent’s account of protecting a child may sit uneasily beside that child’s recollection of being controlled. Such differences need not mean that one person is lying. The same household can be experienced very differently by the people living in it.
Lowen’s predicament shows why recognising different perspectives does not make every account equally reliable. She still has to decide whether what she is reading is an honest account or an invention. Harm remains harm, even when someone supplies a persuasive explanation.
Perhaps the difficult task is to remain open to another account without abandoning our ability to judge.
For some people, these questions are more than an interesting conversation after a film. The possibility of being mistaken, betrayed or caught unprepared can become exhausting. Psychologists use the term intolerance of uncertainty to describe difficulty coping with what is unknown. Research links higher intolerance of uncertainty with greater anxiety and persistent worry.
In a relationship, that difficulty might take the form of repeatedly seeking reassurance: are we all right? Did you really mean that? Is there something you are not telling me? Research has found associations between intolerance of uncertainty, worry and reassurance seeking. It does not follow that every worried question signals a disorder, but it helps explain why reassurance may be sought again and again. The film gives that wish for certainty a dramatic form: each discovery seems to promise Lowen an answer, only to raise another question.
The word paranoia came to mind during Verity, but I would be cautious about using it as a diagnosis for the characters - or for anyone who struggles with trust. Suspicion can arise from genuine betrayal. Equally, feeling certain that something is wrong does not establish that it is. The film makes that gap between conviction and knowledge particularly uncomfortable.
A recent conversation with my wife, who is a consultant physician, brought these questions into a different setting: medicine. Students understandably want clear answers: the diagnosis, the decisive investigation, the correct treatment. Examinations often reward identifying the best answer from the information supplied.
Real patients are less obliging.
Symptoms overlap, tests have limitations and decisions sometimes precede a complete explanation. With experience, the task can shift towards making responsible judgements while recognising what remains unknown.
That seems relevant to Lowen’s predicament. What supports her interpretation? What contradicts it? What would make her reconsider? Confidence becomes dangerous when it closes those questions down.
Accepting uncertainty does not require endless indecision. We still need to act, form relationships and decide whom to trust. Research on treatment for generalised anxiety disorder suggests that people can learn to live more comfortably with doubt.
For me, Verity leaves a question about the point at which a plausible account becomes something we feel entitled to treat as unquestionable. Once we believe we have understood another person, how willing are we to keep listening? How much evidence would it take to disturb the story we have settled upon?
This matters because certainty has consequences. What we believe about another person shapes how we treat them. It can determine whom we defend, whom we condemn, and which actions we feel justified in taking. A mistaken judgement may be reconsidered later, but the harm done in its name may be much harder to undo.
I left Verity wanting a verdict, while becoming suspicious of my own desire for one. My sympathies had shifted, and my confidence had risen, collapsed and rebuilt. Perhaps wisdom involves recognising that we can feel certain and still be wrong - and remaining willing to reconsider what we believe.
The film gives that thought its final words.
“Certainty wasn't the wisest choice.”
