Colleen Hoover built an empire on messing with people’s heads, and “Verity” is proof the formula still works like a charm. Anne Hathaway playing a manipulative author who may or may not be faking a coma is exactly the kind of unhinged premise that gets people buzzing in the group chat the second the credits roll. And honestly? Good. We need more of this chaos in theaters.

Why “Verity” Hits So Hard

Here’s the thing about the Hoover-to-screen pipeline – it works because her books were basically written to be adapted. Short chapters, maximum drama, a twist that makes you want to call your friend immediately. “Verity” has all of that, plus Josh Hartnett doing the “grieving husband who might be in way over his head” thing and Dakota Johnson playing the ghostwriter who gets pulled into a situation she absolutely should’ve run from the second she read page one of that manuscript. That same formula is why Colleen Hoover's $351 million formula just got scrapped for her next big-screen adaptation.

I’m not gonna spoil the ending here, but if you’ve read the book you already know fans have been arguing about what’s actually real since like 2018. That ambiguity is the whole point. It’s the kind of movie that sends you straight to your phone to Google “Verity ending explained,” and then straight back to the group chat to argue about it some more.

So if you walked out of the theater this weekend buzzing and thinking “okay, what else is like this,” I’ve got you. These three are streaming right now and they all deliver that same slightly deranged, slightly delicious domestic-thriller energy. If you want something grittier, Denzel Washington's R-rated thriller just became Netflix's perfectly timed hit.

‘The Housemaid’ (2025)

This one’s practically a spiritual cousin to “Verity,” and not just because it dropped the same year. Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried square off in a wealthy-household-gone-wrong story that starts as a straightforward “new employee, suspicious family” setup and then just… keeps turning. Every time you think you’ve got a read on who’s manipulating who, the movie flips the script again. It’s streaming on Prime Video and it moves fast – no bloated two-and-a-half-hour runtime here, which I appreciate more than I probably should.

‘A Simple Favor’

Look, this one’s a little more tongue-in-cheek than “Verity,” but that’s exactly why it works as a palate cleanser. Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively playing off each other in a mommy-vlogger-meets-missing-persons-case plot is just a genuinely good time, and the twist in the back half is legitimately bonkers in the best way. Paul Feig directing a thriller sounds weird on paper but it absolutely rules in practice – he knows exactly when to let the story get dark and when to let it be funny about how dark it’s gotten. You can stream it on Hulu, and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and go in cold.

“The second that twist hits, you want to pause it and just stare at the wall for a minute.”

Why This Genre Keeps Winning

What’s interesting here is how much appetite there still is for women-led thrillers where nobody’s trustworthy and everything you were told in act one gets flipped by act three. Hollywood tried to kill this genre like fifteen times and it just will not die, because audiences genuinely love being lied to by a movie. We want the rug pulled out. We want to feel a little dumb for not seeing it coming. That’s basically the entire appeal of Gone Girl-style storytelling, and “Verity” leaned all the way into it.

‘The Girl on the Train’

Emily Blunt carries this one on pure anxious energy, playing an alcoholic who may have witnessed something horrific but can’t fully trust her own memory of it. It’s messier and sadder than the other two picks on this list, less “fun twisty ride” and more “unraveling psychological spiral,” but if “Verity” scratched an itch for unreliable narrators lying to themselves as much as everyone else, this is your next stop. It’s currently on Peacock. Fair warning, it’s a bit of a bummer compared to the other two – but a good bummer, if that makes sense.

What This Actually Means

These movies all work for the same basic reason “Verity” is working right now: we’re exhausted by thrillers that spell everything out for us. Give audiences a protagonist who’s lying, a narrator who can’t be trusted, an ending that splits the room into two camps who’ll argue about it on Twitter for years – that’s the stuff that actually sticks. “Verity” isn’t reinventing anything here, and honestly it doesn’t need to. It’s just doing the twisted-domestic-thriller thing really, really well, and these three prove the formula’s got plenty of life left in it. Go stream one tonight. Just maybe don’t watch it right before bed.