Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway Are Bringing Back the Erotic Thriller
The film, based on the 2018 book by Colleen Hoover, will be out this fall
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Anne Hathaway is having a moment—and this fall, it's getting weird. After pivoting between pop stardom and high fashion in 2026, she's now stepping into the murky, blood-soaked world of Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity, where nothing is quite what it seems, and the vibes are decidedly erotic-thriller-meets-psychological-horror. It's a genre shift that, alongside Dakota Johnson's involvement, signals something larger: the resurrection of a cinematic language we thought had peaked in the early 2000s.
The film, directed by Michael Showalter (who reunites with Hathaway after The Idea of You), centers on a deceptively simple premise that unravels into chaos. Johnson plays Lowen, a struggling writer hired to finish a novel for Verity Crawford—a famous author now bedridden after a mysterious car accident. Hathaway embodies Verity with an unsettling knowingness, while Josh Hartnett returns as Jeremy, Verity's husband. The teaser trailer ditches exposition for pure atmosphere: a woman in an icy cabin, bodies tangled in bed, a kiss that becomes something else entirely. There's the moment Hartnett transforms into Hathaway mid-embrace, her teeth drawing blood, Johnson's scream cutting through silence. It's What Lies Beneath energy—that Michelle Pfeiffer-era supernatural seduction where reality fractures and gaslighting becomes foreplay.
The Erotic Thriller Has Left the Building—And Come Back Hotter
What's striking isn't just that these two A-list women are orbiting each other in a thriller drenched in ambiguity and sex. It's that the entire aesthetic vocabulary feels borrowed from a moment when movies weren't afraid to weaponize desire. The trailer doesn't explain itself: there are pills dropped into tea, hands opening mysterious bottles, Hathaway's voice intoning that "there is no light where we are going" over a slowed, dread-soaked version of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head." A body hits a lake. Blood saturates the screen. We're left with the oldest question in cinema—who's lying?—and the newest answer: maybe everyone.
Johnson and Hathaway aren't the first to tap this vein in recent years, but their pairing in a film this deliberately unhinged signals that audiences are hungry for psychological thrillers that treat female characters as dangerous, unreliable, and fully sexual. Verity arrives October 2nd, and based on what we've seen, it's betting everything on the idea that ambiguity and seduction are far more compelling than answers.
Sometimes the smartest move is admitting you don't know who to trust.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
