Much like last year’s smash The Housemaid, Verity is a pulpy, unabashedly soapy erotic throwback to thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Sleeping with the Enemy. Unfortunately, unlike that jolt of cartoonish, female-driven silliness, filmmaker Michael Showalter (The Eyes of Tammy Faye) is way outside his comfort zone with his adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel. His film just isn’t any fun.

Don’t blame the talented cast, especially co-leads Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. They both know exactly what they’re doing, and neither is afraid to embrace the inherent camp factor of the material and vamp things up in their best Bette Davis-Joan Crawford pantomime. Hathaway, in particular, channels her inner Gene Tierney circa Leave Her to Heaven, right down to her character’s vibrant crimson lipstick, haughtily mannered line delivery, and sultry psychological manipulation. The actress continues her exemplary year with her fifth (!) superb performance.

The plot follows talented (if not popular) writer Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson) after she is hired to assist best-selling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway) in completing her next three novels. The catch? Verity doesn’t require an assistant; she needs a full-blown ghostwriter. It’s been kept out of the news, but after a mysterious auto accident, the author has been completely incapacitated. She can’t move, can’t speak, and is confined to either a wheelchair or a bed that auto-adjusts throughout the night to make sure her muscles don’t atrophy. 

In perfect “schlock fiction” fashion, the glossy lunacy does not stop there. Lowen is required to live in Verity’s secluded, avant-garde house while she goes through the writer’s notes (and her horrifying secret autobiography) and deciphers what her plans were for the three books. Also living there is the sexy husband, realtor Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), a loving father who dotes upon his shy son Crew (Brady Wagner) as if the boy’s life depended on it. There’s also ambiguity regarding the drowning death of the boy’s twin sister Harper (Sienna Kulovitz) and whether or not Verity played a secret homicidal role. Lowen has a tragic secret of her own, concealing a painful truth she will never reveal to anyone (or so she thinks).

Having not read Hoover’s book, I can’t speak to how closely the screenplay by Nick Antosca (Antlers) mirrors the source material. But what’s here has all the proper ingredients to make an entertaining meal. It’s not hard to imagine what filmmakers like Brian De Palma or Curtis Hanson would have made of this in the 1980s, or what someone like Coralie Fargeat or Jennifer Kent would do with it now: engage with the lavish, opulent opportunities inherent to the melodrama while playing devilish fun with the sexually provocative elements. 

Showalter, for all his strengths in handling actors and balancing half-baked dramatics with bits of unexpected comedy, doesn’t seem interested in making something so purposefully malevolent and nihilistic. The sex scenes are unintentionally laughable. The homoerotic aspects are comically uninspired. There’s no visual urgency or colorful variety to the images director of photography Jim Frohna (Oh. What. Fun.) produces, wasting the impressively wacky environments that production designer Amy Williams (Death of a Unicorn), art director Joseph Fernandez (The Life List), and set director Kendall Anderson (Companion) meticulously crafted for the film.

What’s most upsetting is that everything builds toward a gloriously nasty climax of indecision and subterfuge, a finale in which the rug had been pulled out from under viewers long before they realized it, much to their euphoric shock and surprise. It is the type of bait-and-switch that would have gone over like gangbusters by the likes of Val Lewton, Tod Browning, or Terence Fisher, and goodness knows that directors like Alfred Hitchcock or De Palma would have made this ending a trashy, operatic treat.

But Showalter can’t do it. He’s kept things so straightlaced for so long that, by the time the narrative is ready to ghoulishly dive off a cliff into a pitch-black pool of nightmares and innuendo, all I could register was an annoyed shrug. What could have been a knockout denouement instead becomes a barely amusing ho-hum, and if not for how marvelously Hathaway plays her scenes with such slinky femme-fatale bravado, it’s doubtful the final 10 minutes would have stuck with me whatsoever. Verity is a frustrating waste of potential. Worse, it’s also a waste of time.