Verity Movie: Director Reveals Two Scrapped Alternate Endings

Michael Showalter told Variety the thriller almost ended with Verity alive and Lowen revealed as a scheming manipulator, before test audiences rejected that twist outright.

Verity could have ended a very different way. Director Michael Showalter has told Variety that the twisty thriller, which follows writer Lowen Ashleigh ghostwriting a bestselling book series for the incapacitated Verity Crawford, went through roughly a hundred versions of its final scene before the filmmakers settled on the one audiences are watching now.

"We tried a hundred million different ways to end this movie," Showalter said. "Figuring out how to end the movie was the biggest challenge and the last thing that we did."

For anyone who hasn't seen it, the film builds to a gut-punch finale. Lowen, played by Dakota Johnson, discovers an unpublished manuscript that appears to show Verity, played by Anne Hathaway, confessing to murdering her own daughter and plotting her own staged suicide. That manuscript drives Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett, to confront his wife, and the three of them end up staging Verity's death by drowning. It's only after a flash-forward, with Lowen pregnant and settled into the Crawford life, that a buried letter flips the story again. Verity says the manuscript was fiction, a writing exercise gone catastrophically wrong, and that Jeremy was the one who staged her suicide after believing it was real.

The version that almost made the cut went somewhere darker. In it, Lowen closes the film by declaring Verity "a master manipulator," then puts on sunglasses and makes a knowing little wave out the car window as a song plays, the implication being that Lowen herself has been running the whole con. Cut to Verity at the bottom of the lake, her eyes suddenly open.

"It was the ending we always thought we were gonna do," Showalter said of that version, calling the reveal that Lowen might be the real mastermind "this amazing moment." He and the team apparently loved it enough to chase it through multiple drafts, what he described as a hundred different attempts at making Verity's survival and Lowen's turn to the dark side land properly on screen.

It didn't survive contact with focus groups. Showalter said the feedback was vague at first, the usual "I didn't like the ending" without much explanation, until the pattern became clear. Audiences weren't ready to watch Lowen shrug off what she'd done and walk away unbothered.

"The audience wanted her to be like, What the f*** have I done?" Showalter said. "We realized the audience is Lowen and the audience wasn't ready to put those glasses on."

So the filmmakers pulled back to the ambiguity that's now on screen, Lowen in the car with Jeremy and his son, unsure what to believe about either of them, the manuscript's truth left hanging. Whether that restraint pays off is already splitting opinion online, with plenty of viewers arguing the twistier cut would have hit harder. Showalter, for his part, seems at peace with the call. Whether Verity gets a sequel chasing that darker version is, for now, anyone's guess.