Spoiler warning: This article reveals major plot points from "Verity."
Verity: "Verity" opened in theaters Oct. 2. The psychological thriller is based on Colleen Hoover's novel of the same name.
It follows three people locked in a game of whodunit.
Anne Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, a bestselling author in a coma after a car crash.
Josh Hartnett plays her husband, Jeremy Crawford. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a rising writer.
Jeremy hires Lowen to finish Verity's thriller series, "Noble Virtues." She moves into the family's remote New England home to do the job.
The manuscript that changes everything
Lowen meets Verity soon after arriving. Verity is paralyzed and unresponsive. She crashed her car into a tree.
Lowen also learns that Verity and the couple's son, Crew (Brady Wagner), were in a canoe accident. His twin sister, Harper, died in it.
While going through Verity's notes, Lowen finds a hidden manuscript. It reads like a memoir.
In it, Verity says she had children only because she loved Jeremy. She says she resented the twins for taking his attention.
She writes that she tried to drown them in the lake, which caused Harper's death.
She adds that Jeremy still did not give her his full devotion, so she crashed her car on purpose.
Lowen begins to doubt Verity's condition. Crew tells her he talks with his mother. Lowen also sees visions of Verity awake.
How Verity dies
Lowen has fallen in love with Jeremy. She tells him about the memoir and says Verity killed Harper.
Jeremy confronts his wife in a rage. Verity confirms she has been faking her illness and has recovered.
Jeremy believes she murdered his daughter. He kills her by smothering her. He then throws her body into the lake.
Lowen covers for him. The two tell police that Verity wandered into the water.
The letter and the twist
Months later, Lowen returns to the cottage to prepare for the move with Jeremy. She finds a loose floorboard. Under it is a letter from Verity to Jeremy.
In the letter, Verity says the memoir was fiction. She calls it "antagonistic journaling," a way to work through her grief.
She says she loved her children. She denies any role in Harper's death.
Verity also claims Jeremy found the manuscript earlier and believed it.
She says he drugged her and drove her car into the tree to kill her.
To protect herself and Crew, she says, she stretched out her coma by faking her condition.
That bought her time to plan an escape and write the letter.
Lowen is left with a chilling thought. She may have fallen for a man who tried to kill his wife once and then succeeded.
So, what is the truth?
The film never says. Neither Lowen nor the audience gets a clear answer.
Some details support the memoir, including the drowning and the red dress Verity wore the night she met Jeremy.
Other details could be embellishment. Verity often writes from the villain's point of view in her novels.
Lowen sums it up by calling Verity a master at manipulating the truth.
Hoover has said she is not fully sure either. She told Entertainment Weekly in September 2026 that she did not know who was guilty while writing the book.
She said she settled on the ending about two weeks before finishing. She then went back and planted some foreshadowing.
What happens to Lowen and Jeremy?
Months after Verity's death, Lowen and Jeremy leave the New England house. They announce that Lowen is pregnant with his baby.
The letter shakes her. Jeremy may have lied to her from the day they met. Even so, she burns the letter so he never sees it.
She then gets in the car and continues her new life with him. She appears focused on raising Crew and releasing her new book. It is the same one she was hired to write for Verity.
How the movie differs from the book
The film stays close to Hoover's 2018 novel. A few changes were made.
The book gives Jeremy and Verity three children. The film has two, which keeps the story moving. Lowen's eerie sleepwalking habit was also cut.
The ambiguous ending and the puzzling letter are the same in both versions. The biggest change comes after Jeremy kills Verity.
In the book, he smothers her and leaves her body in bed. He then says she died in her sleep.
In the film, he stages the death as an accident by throwing her body in the lake.
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