“This is your final warning: only darkness ahead,” says Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) at the end of the official trailer. Based on Colleen Hoover‘s 2018 bestseller, Verity is a popular and polarizing thriller that follows Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who is hired to ghostwrite for a prominent author named Verity after she’s paralyzed in a car accident. When Lowen arrives at Verity’s abode, she discovers a deeply disturbing autobiographical manuscript that upends her perception of the acclaimed author and her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). The Crawford family home quickly becomes more like a haunted house, and Lowen’s ghostwriting gig turns into a reality-blurring nightmare.

Verity marks a sharp departure from the wave of contemporary romance stories that have heretofore connected Hoover to Hollywood. Following her rise to BookTok fame, Hoover’s romance novels have been picked up left and right for film adaptations. The most recent of which, Reminders of Him, starring Maika Monroe, was the best-received of the bunch so far, scoring a 56% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Verity, the fourth Colleen Hoover book-to-screen project, has a chance to perform considerably better than its predecessors because of its distinctly darker, cinematic premise, sure to lure in those unfamiliar with the source material. If the trailer is any indication, the adaptation seems to be maximizing, rather than toning down, the book’s horror elements.

Hoover’s Verity has a notoriously ambiguous ending, which remains at the top of readers’ minds going into the movie. Reigniting the Team Manuscript versus Team Letter debate, the film has an opportunity to weigh in and perhaps settle an enduring literary argument. In Hoover’s book, the audience is largely secured to Lowen’s narration. Each piece of the puzzle is processed through her first-person point of view as she treks through Verity’s (honest?) autobiographical tale. The trailer hints at a slightly different approach, with a glammed-up Hathaway shown as Verity in flashbacks. Red-lipped with an alluring voice-over, Hathaway will bring to life a version of Verity Crawford that readers don’t encounter directly in the novel. The decision to give Verity a speaking role could fundamentally change how audiences interpret her character and, in turn, the novel’s divisive plot twists.

‘Verity’ Is Colleen Hoover’s First R-Rated Book Adaptation

Image via Amazon MGM Studios

The original novel is far from PG-13, being chock-full of explicit material that is both an enticing draw and a point of critique for the page-turner. With this in mind, the film’s biggest challenge will lie in making that material feel well-placed and purposeful within its winding suspense plot, rather than using it for pure shock value. Steamy and gory scenes are warranted and book-accurate, but the most effective horror in Verity is cultivated through subtle details that make the audience question what they’re seeing, reading, and rationalizing.

The trailer unabashedly nods to many of the memorable and unnerving moments for book fans to catch, such as the headboard, the head-turn jump scare, and that tipping canoe. The dead-of-winter rural landscape is immediately chilling and adds to the story’s eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere. Not to mention, the trailer’s well-utilized snippets of Kylie Minogue‘s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” are all too catchy and on the nose for Hoover’s infamous thriller.

Verity is set to hit theaters this fall.