They then report it to the police.

Seven months later, Lowen is pregnant with Jeremy’s child and they are packing up the house when she notices a loose floorboard. Beneath it is a letter from Verity, which states that the manuscript was never a confession at all. It was a writing exercise, an attempt to imagine the darkest possible version of herself, and when Jeremy found it he believed every word and attempted to murder her by staging a car accident. Her catatonia was survival.

Except now she is genuinely dead, and Lowen helped.

There are two things I missed entirely while watching, and both of them are excellent.

The first is that in that letter, Verity uses the phrase “make my death look like an accident.” That is precisely the phrase the audience heard Lowen say to Jeremy in the bedroom an hour of screen time earlier. The film planted it, let you forget it, and then handed it straight back.

The second is a significant departure from the novel. In Hoover’s book, Lowen destroys the letter. In this film, she does not. Showalter has confirmed directly that when the credits roll, that letter is still in Lowen’s pocket, which makes her position considerably more precarious and considerably more interesting.

So which document is true? I genuinely do not know, and that is entirely the design. Hoover’s readers have spent the better part of a decade dividing themselves into Team Manuscript, who take the confession at face value, and Team Letter, who believe Verity was destroyed by her own writing. Hoover herself has said she was writing from inside Lowen’s head, and has described Hathaway’s work here as containing not two Veritys but three: the manuscript Verity that Lowen imagines, the bedridden Verity, and the public Verity from the interviews. Hoover also wrote a bonus chapter for the book which tilts strongly toward Team Letter, and deliberately chose to keep it out of the film.

And then there is the ending they originally shot, which is magnificent and which test audiences rejected outright. Showalter told Variety that the intended finale cut back to Verity sinking into the lake, and her eyes opening. She was alive. Showalter said they attempted a hundred million different ways to end this film and that it was the single biggest challenge of the production.

My wife informs me that the book makes Verity considerably more evil, and she is right in at least one specific respect, which is that in the novel both daughters die rather than one.

So I am going with psycho and leaving it there for the evening.

This was wild from beginning to end, and I had a genuinely great time with it. If you enjoyed The Housemaid, which covered remarkably similar ground last year with Sydney Sweeney moving into a wealthy couple’s enormous house and discovering the wife was not what she appeared, this is firmly in that same lane. That one made over four hundred million dollars on a thirty-five million dollar budget, so clearly a lot of us are enjoying this particular genre at the moment.