Verity review – Dakota Johnson leaves teethmarks as she goes back to Fifty Shades erotic thriller territory

The nation is crying out for a really enjoyable erotic mystery-thriller, a taste potentially at least as strong as the cosy-crime fetish currently dominating our every waking moment. The success of Paul Feig’s naughty-but-not-nice movie The Housemaid proves it. We are thirsting for a sexy encounter with a dishy yet maybe problematic nice-guy husband; we are pining for a damaged and dangerous beautiful wife; we are longing to identify with a vulnerable yet gutsy young person who finds herself in the middle of their creepy scenario and we are yearning to spend some time in a secluded luxury lakeside villa of gigantic modernist proportions down whose night-time corridors we can tremblingly tiptoe. So here is a drama, adapted by screenwriter Nick Antosca from the novel by Colleen Hoover, in which someone has such excitingly transgressive sex that they leave teeth marks on the headboard. During this film, audiences may be leaving teeth marks in the seatback in front of them. Or the back of someone’s head. But not in a good way.

Dakota Johnson goes back into “Fifty Shades” ingenue-cute territory as Lowen, a struggling writer mysteriously approached by a legal team working for Verity Crawford, played by Anne Hathaway, a mega-bestselling author whose recent indisposition means that she is unable to finish her hugely lucrative novel series. Crawford’s people ask Lowen if she might be willing, in exchange for several shedloads of money, secretly to ghostwrite the rest of Crawford’s darkly saucy page-turners. Lowen agrees, largely because she is strangely drawn to Verity’s handsome, sensitive husband Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett. She has to go and stay in their gorgeous Vermont home where she is upset to find that Verity is now immobile, using a wheelchair, and cannot speak. And she is even more upset to discover a certain manuscript by Verity which hints at a terrifying situation of which the world has no clue.

So far, so silly and so entertaining, surely? There are cheeky hints of Daphne du Maurier and Brian De Palma that promise a good time. But we are entitled to wonder why Lowen doesn’t ask someone, anyone, how exactly Verity came to be in this unhappy situation. Perhaps she might be tempted to ask the sinister nurse (Irina Dvorovenko) but this character soon simply and bafflingly disappears. After a sensational opening sequence, the film gradually unwinds, and the entirety of the third act disintegrates into a shower of small substandard plot points that don’t convince. The narrative structure seems to rest on Lowen finding not one but two manuscripts, and we are finally asked to accept a lamely unresolved situation as something fascinatingly ambiguous. This needed a new draft.