Verity review: Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnsons thriller is sexy but smooth and predictable

Running time: 114 minutes.Rated R (sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images).

In theaters Oct.2.Will the attack of the cheap “Gone Girl” clones never cease? How many more outwardly perfect couples with immaculate, modern homes that conceal dark secrets can Hollywood possibly come up with?Plenty, actually, since the appetite for hot trash is bottomless.

Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively’s “A Simple Favor” grossed $93 million in 2018, and last year’s tawdry “The Housemaid” with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried did a massive $400 million.People go wild for this schlock.And so, to keep the lucrative ball rolling comes the predictable “Verity” from the novel by Colleen Hoover, whose “It Ends With Us,” “Regretting You” and “Reminders of Him” were all big screen hits.

The gorgeous duo this time is Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson.Here’s another shimmering Architectural Digest house populated by a pair of well-dressed urban sophisticates with big, soapy, hidden problems.Like in “Simple Favor” and “Housemaid,” a recently arrived woman throws the couple’s lives into chaos.

Or, more likely, beneath the enviable facade, they were already pretty chaotic to begin with.The party crasher here is Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling New York author with a Kennebunkport name.She’s played by Johnson in a retreat back to schlocky “Fifty Shades” territory.One afternoon, en route to an important meeting in Midtown, a car slams into a biker and sprays blood all over Lowen in an almost funny slasher-flick style.

Well, I laughed.Lowen, however, does not.

A nearby man with only the purest of intentions, Jeremy (plaid heartthrob Josh Hartnett), offers to take care of the freaked out girl and even gives her the shirt off his back.So kind! Jeremy then reveals in the bathroom that he recently had to drag his dead eight-year-old daughter out of a lake.

Nice to meet you, too?But minutes later Lowen is in a conference room w...