The Colleen Hoover adaptation "Verity" promises a trashy good time, but only delivers on half that proposition. And not the good half.

It's the kind of movie, like last year's hit "The Housemaid," which is built from the DNA of yesteryear's erotic thrillers, juiced up with a game cast that knows the waters in which they're swimming. But where "The Housemaid" made good on its frothy premise, "Verity" comes up dry. It's all soap and no suds.

Anne Hathaway stars as Verity Crawford, bestselling author of lurid crime fiction novels with one-word titles such as "Honor" and "Hospitality." When Verity is rendered paralyzed following a car wreck, her team seeks an author to continue her work, ghost-penning the latest entries in her hit "Noble Virtues" series.

They recruit Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, flat by even Dakota Johnson standards), a published but struggling novelist whose book readings draw single-digit crowds. She first makes the acquaintance of Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett), Verity's husband, at a crosswalk where a woman has just been hit by a motorist and Lowen is doused in her blood.

Jeremy follows her to a nearby bathroom where she cleans up and is in no hurry whatsoever to wipe the dead stranger's blood off of her face and clothing. He decides to one-up her situation by telling her he's seen much worse, such as the time he pulled his 8-year-old's body out of a lake.

All normal stuff, nothing to see here.

And for awhile, "Verity" offers up a kind of dumb-fun play on a familiar formula, as Lowen moves into Verity's house to continue her work, slowly growing closer to Jeremy along the way.

But its laborious pacing really starts to drag in the second hour, there's no heat whatsoever in its romance and its clunky writing becomes plodding. ("We were junkies," Verity writes, "I was his drug, and he was mine." Spare me!)

By the time it has to deliver something of substance and its big twist finally arrives, it has the double misfortune of being both poorly handled and completely unsatisfying, raising more questions than it answers. Chief among them: what's the point of any of this?

"Verity" is directed by Michael Showalter, reteaming with Hathaway after the charming 2024 boy band romance "The Idea of You," and he has no feel whatsoever for the material. Where Paul Feig dialed up the dishiness and drama of "The Housemaid," creating a devilish and delicious comic stew, Showalter's approach is flat-footed, and does nothing to serve what is an already dour drama.

Feig also had better material to work with. The screenplay here by Nick Antosca, which is based on Hoover's 2018 novel, is all set up and no payoff, relishing in writing exercises as major narrative twists.

Even the subjects "Verity" pretends to give voice to, such as maternal jealousy, are handled with the delicacy of a woman standing on the street and being splattered by a stranger's blood. "Verity" is both a writing exercise and a movie gone off the rails.

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'VERITY'

Grade: D

MPA rating: R (for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images)

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: In theaters Oct. 2

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