Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett co-star in this unconvincing mystery about a struggling writer who is asked to ghostwrite for a bestselling author<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s head. But not in a good way.<\/p>\n
Dakota Johnson goes back into \u201cFifty Shades\u201d 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\u2019s people ask Lowen if she might be willing, in exchange for several shedloads of money, secretly to ghostwrite the rest of Crawford\u2019s darkly saucy page-turners. Lowen agrees, largely because she is strangely drawn to Verity\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/aaec6ce6fbdd49e6375f52744896302b2f2f913c\/250_0_2500_2000\/master\/2500.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=3bcc9494f2729cf4c8f56428cc2bd632\" "\\"Verity")
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