Verity book vs movie ending: the book makes you choose between two stories — the film adds a third

Amazon MGM's Verity opened on October 2, 2026, with Anne Hathaway as bestselling author Verity Crawford, Dakota Johnson as Lowen Ashleigh, the writer hired to ghostwrite the rest of her series, and Josh Hartnett as Verity's husband Jeremy. Showalter directed from a script by Nick Antosca, and the $40 million thriller had made $122.2 million worldwide by October 18, per Wikipedia's box office figures). Critics were less generous, at 31% on Rotten Tomatoes, though Slate's Rebecca Onion called it "an adaptation that bests the source material."

Hoover's 2018 novel has kept readers arguing for years over which version of Verity to believe. The film doesn't settle the argument. It makes it bigger.

Spoilers for the book and the film from here on.

The book's two stories

Lowen moves into the Crawfords' Vermont house to ghostwrite Verity's series and finds an unfinished autobiography. The novel then builds two incompatible accounts of the same woman:

• The manuscript: Verity's autobiography describes resenting her children as rivals for Jeremy's love and admits to causing a daughter's death. Lowen believes it, Jeremy reads it and kills Verity, and Lowen helps make the death look like an accident.
• The letter: Months later, Lowen finds a letter Verity wrote to Jeremy. It calls the autobiography a writing exercise and accuses Jeremy of staging the car crash that left her disabled.
• Lowen's choice: She's pregnant with Jeremy's child. She destroys the letter, never tells him and stays.

Readers split into Team Manuscript and Team Letter, per Yahoo's ending explainer. A bonus chapter in the 2022 deluxe edition pushed things toward the letter: six months on, the family lives in Southport, North Carolina, Lowen has a baby daughter named Nova, and Jeremy kills an old acquaintance who recognizes him. Hoover has said the chapter was "just a bonus for readers," and the film doesn't use it.

"I'm Team Manuscript."

— Colleen Hoover, on a podcast, via Tyla

Hoover has since said that making the movie changed how she sees the character. She once thought of Verity as purely evil and now feels more sorry for her, per Mamamia.

What the film changes

The skeleton is the same: manuscript, murder, letter. The details around it move:

• One daughter, not two: The film cuts Chastin, so Harper is the only Crawford daughter who dies. Hoover said the filmmakers asked to remove a child because of running time.
• The murder: In the book, Jeremy smothers Verity and stages it as dying in her sleep. In the film, Lowen suggests suffocation once Jeremy starts strangling her, and they put the body in the lake where Harper drowned.
• The aftermath: The book jumps seven months ahead. The film stays to watch the couple cry to police while Verity's body comes out of the lake.
• The letter: In the book, Lowen destroys it. In the film, she keeps it.

That last change is the one Showalter talks about. "So yes, when the movie ends, that letter is still in her pocket," he said.

The third story

Showalter's own description of the film is that it doesn't pick a side. He told E! News he found himself not taking sides, and Fiction Horizon reads his framing as Verity, Jeremy and Lowen each taking a turn as a narrator who may be unreliable.

"You get three different versions of the story."

— Michael Showalter, director, to E! News

My read: the third version is Lowen's. The book lets her be the reader's stand-in, a woman who picks the story she can live with and burns the other one.

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The film has her suggest how to kill Verity and publish Verity's novel, then hold on to the one document that could incriminate the man she's about to have a child with. A narrator who keeps evidence isn't choosing between two stories. She's keeping one in reserve.

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The film nearly added a fourth. Showalter said the team first planned an ending in which Lowen admits she doesn't know whom to believe, calls Verity a master manipulator, puts on sunglasses and smiles, and the film cuts to Verity alive with her eyes open in the lake. The team tried roughly a hundred versions of that ending, nicknamed "dark phoenix," and focus groups hated it.

The book ends with Lowen tearing up the letter and choosing. The film ends with the letter in her pocket, which means she hasn't chosen yet, and neither has the audience.