Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson Enter a Dangerous Game of Secrets, Obsession and Deception in a Dark Psychological Thriller
Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson are stepping into one of Colleen Hoover’s darkest stories yet, a psychological thriller built around a secluded family estate, a damaged marriage and a collection of private writings that may contain horrifying truths — or an elaborate deception.
Hathaway takes on the role of Verity Crawford, a phenomenally successful author whose life has been shattered by personal tragedy. Once responsible for a hugely popular series of books, Verity is no longer able to complete them, leaving her unfinished work — and the future of the series — hanging in the balance.
That is where Lowen Ashleigh enters the picture.
Played by Dakota Johnson, Lowen is a struggling writer presented with the sort of opportunity that could completely transform her career. She is hired to go through Verity’s material and finish the books on her behalf, a seemingly straightforward professional assignment that brings her directly into the Crawford family’s isolated world.
To do the job properly, Lowen stays at the Crawfords’ remote estate, surrounded by Verity’s manuscripts, notes and personal belongings. But buried among the material she is supposed to examine, she discovers something she was never meant to find.
There are pages that appear to be autobiographical.
And what they contain paints a deeply disturbing picture of the woman whose work Lowen has been hired to complete.
The writings contain unsettling claims about Verity’s private life, her relationship with her husband Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett, and devastating events that have affected the Crawford family. The deeper Lowen reads, the more difficult it becomes to simply put the pages aside and continue doing her job.
If the words are true, they could change everything.
But that becomes the terrifying problem at the heart of the story: are they true at all?
Lowen has entered a house where almost everyone seems to be carrying something they would rather keep hidden. Verity remains an unnerving presence, Jeremy is grieving a family life that has fallen apart, and Lowen increasingly finds herself occupying a position that goes far beyond that of a hired writer.
Her growing connection with Jeremy only makes the situation more volatile.
Professional boundaries begin to disappear as suspicion and attraction become tangled together. Lowen is no longer merely studying another author’s work. She is becoming emotionally involved with the people described in those pages while trying to decide whether the disturbing account she has uncovered should be believed.
And Verity herself may be the most difficult person of all to understand.
Anne Hathaway’s character sits at the center of the mystery, forcing both Lowen and the audience to question how much of what they see — and what they read — can actually be trusted. A look, a movement or a seemingly insignificant detail can suddenly carry a completely different meaning.
That uncertainty gives the story its most sinister edge.
There isn’t simply a secret waiting to be uncovered. There are competing versions of the truth, and believing the wrong one could have devastating consequences.
For readers familiar with Colleen Hoover’s 2018 bestseller, that atmosphere of doubt is a major part of what made the novel such a phenomenon. The book moved away from the straightforward romance Hoover is widely associated with and plunged into much darker territory, combining psychological suspense with obsession, desire, grief, manipulation and morally complicated relationships.
Now Hathaway, Johnson and Hartnett bring that claustrophobic triangle to the screen, with director Michael Showalter overseeing the adaptation.
At its core, this is more than a mystery about incriminating pages hidden inside an isolated home. It is a story about how easily intimacy can become manipulation, how dangerous desire can become when mixed with suspicion, and how frightening the truth can be when there is no reliable way to distinguish confession from fiction.
Lowen arrived to finish somebody else’s story.
Instead, she finds herself becoming part of it — and the closer she gets to the Crawford family’s darkest secrets, the less certain she can be about who is manipulating whom.