The inert erotic thriller “Verity” begins almost with a rom-com meet-cute, except it’s a meet-horrible. Lowen (Dakota Johnson), a struggling New York writer, is on her way to a publishing meeting when suddenly she’s drenched in blood, due to the inconvenient traffic-related demise of a nearby anonymous cyclist. A handsome stranger (Josh Hartnett) takes her to a nearby coffee-shop restroom and gallantly gives her his shirt, seeing as her sweater is red beyond repair. They have a brief and extremely tragic conversation about dead people and, after dabbing off most of the blood, off she goes to her meeting. Guess who is sitting at the conference table? Yes, it's the very same handsome stranger, who turns out to be the husband of the famous comatose author whose book Lowen is being asked to complete! I kid you not! I don’t know why Nora Ephron never thought of this.

Based on a Colleen Hoover bestseller, “Verity” is quite the twisted romantic triangle. Lowen quickly packs up her many sweaters and heads off to the remote upstate mansion of Verity (Anne Hathaway) and Jeremy Crawford to work on Verity’s latest installment of a hugely successful fiction series, while the author herself lies pale and unmoving in a nearby room, tended by a Mrs. Danvers-like nurse (Irina Dvorovenko) who really seems like she should have an entire sinister subplot of her own. Lowen, searching through Verity’s notes, finds an unpublished autobiography full of chilling revelations and annoying sentence fragments. Meanwhile, Lowen and Jeremy are eyeing each other, and before you know it, they’re engaging in foreplay over a cupcake (this is not a metaphor, and honestly I think Lowen would have been better off sticking with the cupcake) and re-creating an erotic scene in Verity’s book involving a toothmark-ridden headboard. But is Verity, who may or may not be sending cold stares Lowen’s way when nobody else is looking, really in a coma?

It’s my sad duty to inform you that “Verity” is quite the slog; if you were hoping for the enjoyable sort of erotic thriller, like Paul Feig’s “The Housemaid” last winter, you’ll be quite disappointed. Johnson, who gives her usual sleepy deadpan punctuated by oddly precise line readings, finds no chemistry whatsoever with Hartnett, though to be fair they’re not helped by a screenplay that requires Lowen and Jeremy to be a pair of personality-free dopes. (Seeing Jeremy outside, Lowen tells him in a monotone that he is “making a big pile of wood.” Um, yes, and perhaps there’s a reason nobody’s buying Lowen’s books.) The only fun here comes from Hathaway, in flashbacks of pre-coma Verity; she’s wickedly good at playing villains, and unlike her two co-stars, she seems in on the joke.

Director Michael Showalter finds a couple of decent jumpscares, but he can’t get blood from a stone (though he gets it elsewhere; there’s a lot of biting, not to mention knife-tonguing and tack-sticking into people's arms for the purpose of determining coma status). I kept waiting to find out that dead biker was the nurse's secret lover, or something, but no such luck. Whatever the consciousness level of Verity herself might be, “Verity” is definitely comatose.

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'VERITY'

1.5 stars (out of 4)

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

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: Now in theaters

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