Melodrama is perched on the edge of laughter because it’s intrinsically a parody of tragedy, an infusion of heroic grandeur into workaday lives. The laughter I hear (and sometimes even unleash) when I’m in a theatre watching a classic melodrama never seems, or feels, derisive but, rather, astonished. So it was, too, when I saw one of the more classically tailored of recent melodramas, “It Ends with Us,” from 2024, adapted from a novel by Colleen Hoover. That movie’s absurdities didn’t occur onscreen but in the subsequent legal tussles between its star, Blake Lively, and its director and co-star, Justin Baldoni. It’s a very different matter with a new Hoover adaptation, “Verity” (based on her novel of the same name), directed by Michael Showalter and starring Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, and Josh Hartnett. For one thing, where “It Ends with Us” was essentially a romantic tangle, “Verity” turns into a crime drama, a genre with altogether more stringent logical demands. Sadly, Showalter and the scriptwriter, Nick Antosca, are completely unable to meet these demands, with the result that the absurdities are all on the screen.

“Verity” is a drama of the literary world, but one so narrowed by the conveniences of cut-to-fit plotting that not only the characters but the entire world depicted are unbelievable. A young novelist in New York, Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), who has few readers and little acclaim, is summoned to a meeting in midtown with a big publisher (Hachette, which is the actual publisher of Hoover’s novel). While she’s waiting at a crosswalk en route to the office, a car hits a bike messenger, leaving her spattered in the cyclist’s blood from the waist up. A man named Jeremy (Hartnett) comes to her aid, informing her of a nearby coffee shop with a bathroom. There, in the men’s room with Jeremy, she washes the blood off her face and from her hair and rinses her clothes and, of course, a frisson of attraction passes between them. But wait a second: not only has she left the scene of a potential homicide to which she’s an eyewitness —she’s also been walking through the streets and into a coffee shop, covered in a stranger’s blood. Already the viewer is in cloud-cuckoo-land; the pavement might as well erupt with the sandworms of Arrakis.

Jeremy literally gives her the shirt off his back. (The shirt is white; she puts it on while still blood-spattered, and she keeps wiping herself clean while it somehow remains spotless.) It turns out he is on his way to the same meeting, at which the publisher makes her a lucrative offer to ghostwrite three books for the titular character, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), an esteemed and best-selling novelist who is none other than Jeremy’s wife. She has been incapacitated after a car accident but has left copious notes for the next book in a series. To do the job, Lowen must temporarily move into the author’s home, a coolly lavish modern house in rural Vermont, where Verity’s many boxes of files are stored—and where, of course, Jeremy also lives. Verity is immobile and catatonic, and Lowen learns that the family’s life is also darkened by a child’s accidental death. But, in the course of her residence there, Lowen begins to suspect Verity of heinous deeds—and of an elaborate scam of which Jeremy is a victim. Falling in love with him, Lowen takes it upon herself to bring justice to the household.

I confess: I’m fudging some details, both to avoid spoilers and to present the story in a bare-bones way that emphasizes its enticements and its passionate potential. Yet, from the start, the director, Michael Showalter, can’t be bothered to anchor the action in the ordinary causal relations that arise from this plot, in the social contexts that surround it, or in the personalities that drive it. By contrast, the great movie melodramas (whether classical, such as “All That Heaven Allows,” or modernist, like “Remember My Name”) are all richly parenthesized, illuminated by discourse with or among secondary characters who weigh in on the main characters’ views and actions. Yet “Verity” offers no cultural or civic elements that might orient the story, whether a philosophical mentor, a beloved book, a principled cause, a quasi-religious ideal, or even a decisive political event. The movie takes place in a bubble—not just an intellectual and social vacuum but also a practical one.

The things that Lowen discovers (and the events that her inquiries spark) involve the kind of violence that makes news. Yet the ridiculously cursory investigations, by police and the press, are far inferior to a random episode of “Law & Order” in the attention to meaningful details and the kinds of official involvement that such plots self-evidently elicit. Because the story lines are facile fakes, because the characters are blanked out, the substance of relationships is reduced to dialogue of generalities and platitudes. It’s hard to blame the actors for ungrounded performances when they have no substance, no characterization, no practical psychology to work with. Showalter’s direction doesn’t create a world in which they can take part; they are left acting in a void.

My colleague Becca Rothfeld recently discussed the joys of bad movies, and although the notion of “good bad movies” troubles me—as a kind of cinematic class discrimination against crude but sharp pleasures—I get (and use) the term as a useful shorthand. Some movies manifest a sort of exuberant incoherence: a filmmaker’s delight in style-challenged excitement, thrust onto the screen in naïve and spontaneous symbolism, becomes contagious. Maybe “Verity” could have overcome its Tinkertoy psychology and hand-waving impracticality by way of verve and frenzy, of uninhibited and overheated expression. But, in the film, there’s no room for impulse or surprise; “Verity” is smothered in good taste and aspirational dignity, and not even an incompetent crime investigation is as ridiculous as such airs. ♦