Kazakhstani cinemas are showing «The Secret Diary of Verity» — an adaptation of Colleen Hoover's popular novel. For Anne Hathaway, who starred in one of the lead roles, this is already her fourth film released this year, and judging by early box office numbers, another potential hit — although critics did not appreciate the picture. In terms of plot and genre, the film resembles the recent «The Housemaid», which became unexpectedly successful, and the creators of «The Secret Diary of Verity» obviously want to follow in its footsteps. About who wins in this confrontation between the two films and what artistic tradition they both inherit — in Kursiv's review. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
A young and not-too-popular writer Lowen (Dakota Johnson) receives a tempting work offer: to finish a new novel by top author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who recently got into a car accident and thus cannot fulfill her obligations to the publisher, which does not want to lose another bestseller. Both write in the same thriller genre, and the hiring party, in the person of Verity's handsome husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), invites Lowen to their luxurious house located in the Vermont wilderness so that she can sort through the drafts and sketches of the planned book. But the guest's attention is first drawn to a mysterious manuscript on a flash drive found in the office — the writer's autobiography, revealing a completely different side of her personality. Worst of all, it seems to describe a real murder.
The 1940 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's work «Rebecca» not only became Alfred Hitchcock's first Hollywood work, but also, as is commonly believed, laid the foundation for an entire direction or even genre — what some film scholars later dubbed female gothic or gothic melodrama. Not only Hitchcock, who later made «Suspicion» and «Shadow of a Doubt» (note the telling titles of these films), felt great in it, but also other directors — the famous director George Cukor, for example, released the thriller «Gaslight», to which we owe the term «gaslighting» that has come into common use.
In the book «Formulas of Fear. An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Horror Film», the following characterization is given to such films: «The narrative in these pictures was often built on a model combining the fairy-tale plots of «Beauty and the Beast» and «Bluebeard». An attractive but poor and inexperienced girl gets married (variants: hired as a nurse, governess, or housemaid), arrives at a distant estate where everything looks unfamiliar and sinister, encounters some secret in the course of the action, skeletons begin to fall out of the family closets one after another — and now the heroine suspects her new husband or lover of being at least a maniac-murderer…» An important motif, recorded including by Hitchcock, is the constant unstable female perception of surrounding events, which can be interpreted in different ways.
Right now the screens are not at all lacking in gothic (just recently, for example, new versions of «Frankenstein» and «Nosferatu» were released, and «Wuthering Heights» with Margot Robbie also returned viewers to this rich literary tradition), but it was precisely this variant, modernized by Hollywood directors, that made itself known again at the beginning of this year, when the box-office successful «The Housemaid» with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried was released, which faithfully and carefully reproduced the key tropes — a poor girl, a mysterious mansion keeping secrets, and a husband clearly reminiscent of Bluebeard. It is clear that Paul Feig is not at all Alfred Hitchcock, and the film could at best offer a production at the level of television output from the Hallmark channel, which became a kind of meme, and the striking image of Seyfried enjoying the absurdity of what is happening. But compared to «The Secret Diary of Verity», «The Housemaid» is almost the pinnacle of world cinema.
One has to take it on faith that Verity is the author of truly blood-curdling books, because the film itself desperately lacks energy, excitement, intrigue. It is no coincidence that its heroine is Dakota Johnson with an eternally bored expression on her face, which Jeremy will one day not fail to tell her (the actress's phenomenally bad performance again pulls toward an anti-award, as in the case of the infamous «Madame Web»). And it is hard to get into what is happening when one star does nothing but read the manuscript, and the second sits motionless in a chair most of the time — there is catastrophically little suspense in this.
«The Housemaid» had the sense to demonstrate a partially guessable plot twist in the middle of the picture to shake up the narrative. In «The Secret Diary of Verity», one has to painfully, half-asleep wait almost two hours for a disappointing denouement that means practically nothing — only out of delicacy can this be called an open ending, instead of which one could immediately come up with several more satisfactory options. There is no talk of any ambiguity characteristic of the genre. The hints scattered throughout the story lead, as a rule, nowhere (for example, in the film there is a rather gloomy nurse whose role is to somehow inform Lowen about Verity's condition). Claims about the carelessness of the script, the author of which was Nick Antosca, an experienced screenwriter and creator of the cult-in-narrow-circles series «Channel Zero» and «Brand New Cherry Flavor», it seems, should still be addressed to Colleen Hoover's original, whose prose, apparently, is congenial to Johnson's acting talent.
Roman Polanski warned us in his film «The Ghost Writer» that the work of a ghostwriter is difficult and dangerous, and that careless confessions in literary form entail trouble — the Cannes triumph «Anatomy of a Fall». Of course, it is clear that «The Secret Diary of Verity» is a film of a completely different caliber, and perhaps watching it as a comedy rather than the thriller declared in the synopsis can brighten up a couple of hours, but it is still a pity that over more than eighty years the notorious female gothic has lost its elegance, landing somewhere on the shelf with trash. And it seems the only mystery