Due to either timing or ambition, Anne Hathaway has been ubiquitous on movie screens this year in a way she hasn’t since winning an Oscar some years ago. In this curiously inert thriller based on a bestselling potboiler by Colleen Hoover she plays a Hoover-like novelist who lives in the kind of rich splendor you’d expect of a tech billionaire, except as the movie opens she isn’t exactly living. Verity Crawford is in a semi-vegetative state owing to an automobile accident, but her publisher has a lot riding on her popularity, which is based on a series of connected books she hasn’t finished yet. In the opening scene, there’s an ominous meet-cute between Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett, someone else we’ve seen a lot of this year after being in the silver screen wilderness for ages), and a young, relatively unknown writer named Lowen (Dakota Johnson, also…never mind), who is on her way to a secret meeting arranged by her agent with Verity’s publisher when she witnesses up close someone get hit by a car, splattering her with blood. Jeremy, who just happens to be walking by, chivalrously offers her his shirt.

It turns out Jeremy is going to the same meeting. The publisher wants Lowen to ghost-write Verity’s next novel secretly based on Verity’s copious notes since their styles are so similar. Hesitating at first due to her own literary goals, Lowen eventually agrees when the price gets too high to refuse, and she is soon ensconced in the couple’s rambling Vermont mansion-on-a-lake along with their very young son and Verity’s full-time nurse. Lowen takes to the work like a duck to water but while searching through the stacks of notes comes across a thumb drive containing a draft of Verity’s memoir that paints her as a sociopathic depressive capable of killing her own children, and, as it turns out, her son is a twin whose sister died before the accident that made Verity bedridden. At this point, the director heightens the already creepy atmosphere with jump scares that make Lowen think Verity isn’t as comatose as she looks. Moreover, Jeremy is making serious moves on the younger writer that eventualy pay off.

Though Verity is seen in a lot of flashbacks derived from the memoir, Hathaway’s main presence as an actor is in those scenes where she portrays someone who is, in medical lingo, “non-responsive,” and for what it’s worth she’s the only convincing presence in the film, but that’s not to say Johnson and Hartnett do hack work, but rather that their characters are such poorly drawn suspense-movie stereotypes that nothing they do feels plausible. The requisite twists not only make no sense, they contradict one another in mounting succession until the end, when Hoover or the screenwriter, Nick Antosca, literally loses the plot. Potboilers should boil.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

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