8 Sultry Literary Thrillers To Watch After Verity
October 2026 should go down in history as the moment when Anne Hathaway and Colleen Hoover — the biggest female movie star and American writer of their respective generations — collided.
The movie responsible for this is Michael Showalter’s Verity, a frothy thriller full of twists, turns, and steamy desire. It stars Hathaway alongside Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, and BookTok is going crazy over it.
Of course, Hollywood has long been acquainted with these particular kinds of stories: from at least as far back as the early days of film noir — a genre rich with unreliable narrators, femme fatales, sultry romance, and double crossing — with a notable resurgence in the 1990s and early ‘00s.
So, if you’ve just seen Verity and are hungry for more, we’ve got you covered: in the list below, you’ll find eight relatively recent movies from the literary suspense world — just the kind of cinematic page-turners to keep you company as the evenings get cold and the nights grow darker.
Oh for the days when a technically-masterful director could be brought in to adapt the pulpiest, best-selling thriller of the moment. This is exactly what happened when Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl was adapted for the screen by David Fincher — resulting in a movie that unfolded with all the dog-eared charms of your favorite paperback.
It’s also a movie that clearly influenced Verity, and not least with regards to its unreliable characters. The basic plot begins with a woman’s disappearance before revealing itself to be something entirely different in the second act — the less said about which, the better.
What we can reveal is that Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, and Carrie Coon all give knockout performances in a movie that only gets more interesting on your second or third watch.
If Verity made you think of one recent movie, I’m guessing that that movie was The Housemaid, a perfectly solid popcorn thriller from 2025 in which Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney played employer and employee: one an apparently unhinged housewife of a wealthy man (played by Brandon Sklenar), the other an unemployed woman with an apparently shady past.
If the above synopsis sounds like something you’ve seen before, that suspicion is all part of the movie’s design — an erotic thriller with as many red herrings as there are twists and turns.
David Koepp is the screenwriter who helped to bring Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible to the big screen in the 1990s, so to say he knows how to entertain an audience would be an understatement. As a director, his work is a little patchier, but this version of Secret Window still feels like a hidden gem.
Adapted from a novel by Stephen King, the movie sees Johnny Depp play a novelist who retreats to a rural cabin after discovering his wife wants a divorce. While there, he starts to believe that a man accusing him of plagiarising one of his stories might be capable of much worse things than accusations.
Writers, trees, erotic affairs? It’s all those Verity ingredients with a good helping of ‘90s style to wash them down.
Caught Secret Window and need even more sexy, secluded and potentially deadly suspense? What Lies Beneath ticks all those boxes and more.
Starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, this 26-year-old supernatural thriller from Robert Zemeckis has aged as well as the stars themselves — a movie about a gorgeous and successful married couple living in a gorgeous lakeside house in Vermont.
As the title suggests, of course, not everything is as tranquil as it seems.
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If you saw Verity and are eager to watch more worrying films about the writing process, not least the problematic side-effects of dreaming up certain characters, Ruby Sparks approaches both with a lighthearted touch that conceals a more sobering message.
The movie sees real life husband and wife Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan (who also wrote the screenplay) play a writer and a character he’s created, respectively. What begins as a cutesy indie setup, however, evolves into a thorny takedown of the manic pixie era. If you’re watching East of Eden this Autumn and are curious to see Kazan’s earliest produced script, this is the one to watch.
Another sexy, secluded thriller that Verity fans should think about dipping their toe into is Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool.
This unofficial 2003 update of Jacques Deray's 1969 film La Piscine stars the great Charlotte Rampling as a successful crime novelist who travels to her publisher’s house in the South of France where an elusive and beautiful young woman and a very real crime awaits her.
For something even more offbeat, this experimental portrait of the writer Shirley Jackson, starring Elisabeth Moss and directed by Josephine Decker, dissolves the usual parameters of the biopic to deliver a jaggedly ethereal movie that feels more like a psychological thriller.
Released in 2020, in between the third and fourth seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss is at the peak of her powers as a “difficult” writer attempting to build on the sensational response that her 1948 short story The Lottery received.
No list of literary-minded suspense movies can be complete without Rob Reiner’s Misery, a 1991 classic about a romance novelist who’s held captive by a psychotically-devoted fan.
Another movie that began its life in the mind of Stephen King, the story follows James Caan’s Paul Sheldon, a successful writer who crashes his car en route to New York and wakes up in the all-too-loving-care of superfan Annie Wilkes — played in a legendary (and Oscar-winning) performance by Kathy Bates.
Richard Farnsworth and Lauren Bacall round out the cast of what is still one of the finest King adaptations of all time.
