After seeing the first of our movie marathon day, we walked to another mall where the next one was playing. We got just enough time to arrive there few minutes before the movie start. It was a newly released psychological thriller which interest me due to the cast involved. All right then, I'll get on with the movie.
Brief Story Line
Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson - Madame Web, Fifty Shades trilogy etc) was an author who had published just one mystery novel and struggling to be successful. When her agent Corey (Ismael Cruz Córdova - The Bluff, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV series etc) got the word of a gig to ghost write for best selling novelist Verity (Anne Hathaway - The End of Oak Street, The Devil Wears Prada 2 etc) who was unable to finish her novels due to car accident, Lowen was not comfortable at first. However she was finally convinced by Verity's husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett - Trap, Black Hawk Down etc) and agreed to move in their secluded house to go through the materials.
In Verity & Jeremy's house, Lowen met with their young child Crew (Brady Wagner) and also Verity's nurse Anna (Irina Dvorovenko - The Americans TV series etc). As she began to review the materials, Lowen started to notice things that made her suspect disturbing things surrounding the family.
So how would the story conclude? You could find out in this movie.
End of Brief Story Line
As I said above, I was intrigued by the movie due to its psychological thriller genre. And usually when it was adapted from books, movie like this tend to be quite interesting with multiple plost twists. However, when we saw this one, my wife and I found that the story was rather predictable. And to our surprise, there was only a twist which was OK but not so mind blowing. To me it felt rather lacking after watching for a long time. Yes, it indeed has a long duration of 117 minutes including closing credits but no mid or post end credit scene.
During the movie I thought there were few intimate scenes that rather surprised me. After reading more info, I realized that it was apparently classified as erotic psychological thriller. When I saw the film, I noticed one or two times where seemingly there was a censor (brief jump of the scenes), but in general it was surprisingly still quite a lot shown. I did not see one film of such genre last year because I thought there would have been too much scenes cut, though now it would seem that it could have gotten the same treatment. It was a pity though cause reviews were way more positive on that film compared to this one.
The three lead cast of Hathaway, Johnson and Hartnett were quite good in here despite some critics who felt the chemistry was forced. Dakota Johnson was no stranger to erotic thriller with her past experience while Hathaway has been so productive this year as this marked her appearance in a fifth movie in 2026. As mentioned above, this was adapted from a novel of the same title, written by Colleen Hover which was positively reviewed and not surprising it was later adapted into a movie. The film itself was directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick, The Eyes of Tammy Faye etc) and written by Nick Antosca (writer of Antlers, co-creator of Brand New Cherry Flavor TV series etc).
While watching this, we felt it has the standard pace which was understandable for a slow burn movie. The eerie feel in the early part was quite effective, plus few jump scare scenes that had great impact on us. The story telling was OK, just that it lacked major surprises for us. I got to admit that I was hoping for a more shocking end, and I thought it might be due to change done by the filmmakers, but apparently it was the same as in the book. Overall this was a pretty decent psychological thriller film with brief erotic moments (not like those well known erotic classics such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and such). Though it might not be as well received like last year's hit, it was adequate to entertain us. So if you are looking for something like this, you can give it a try. But if you want a high quality psychological thriller with many twists, then this might not satisfy you. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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