Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.

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[Warning: This story contains spoilers for the Verity film.]

Colleen Hoover didn’t know how her novel Verity would end when she started writing it.

“I think it wasn’t until like two weeks before I turned it in that I realized, like, oh, it doesn’t need a resolution,” Hoover tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I was even a little surprised that that’s how it ended.”

Hoover’s 2018 novel, Verity, is a gripping mystery where trust is elusive and the line between fiction and reality blurs. The story follows Lowen, a struggling writer hired to complete the book series of renowned author Verity Crawford after an accident leaves Verity paralyzed and unable to communicate. While staying at the Crawford home to access Verity’s notes, Lowen discovers a chilling hidden manuscript: Verity’s unfinished autobiography.

But it‘s what is in the autobiography that begins to make Lowen question who Verity really is. The manuscript recounts her passionate relationship with husband Jeremy and reveals a shocking malevolence toward their children, including an admission that she killed one of them, letting Jeremy believe it was an accident. However, a letter Lowen uncovers later claims the manuscript was purely fictional and a writing exercise she was advised to do by her publisher. This revelation comes after Jeremy, with Lowen’s assistance, has confronted and ultimately killed Verity in vengeance for their child’s death.

Fans have long debated the novel’s central mystery: Is Verity the monster she writes in her manuscript, or the victim described in her letter?

Hoover didn’t initially plan the story’s ambiguity, but it challenges the mystery genre’s typical need for a definitive conclusion. By leaving the central question unanswered, the narrative becomes an interactive puzzle, encouraging readers to interpret the clues and debate the truth long after turning the final page.

Hoover admits her own read of what‘s real has shifted. “When I wrote the book and ended it how I ended it, I was in Lowen’s perspective. It was first-person from Lowen, so I was just as confused as she was, and I’ve carried that with me until recently,” she tells THR. “I had to read it again for the first time after watching the film, and I think the film influenced me. I’ve actually gained a whole new perspective, and I still don’t know.”

Director Michael Showalter, who adapted the book for the screen that released on Friday and stars Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, isn’t sure where he stands either. “All the actors have their own version of what they believe is true, and I wanted to honor each of their versions,” he says. “So I’m agnostic.”

So how do you craft a mystery with no resolution? That challenge is what intrigued Showalter, who says he was drawn to the psychosexual thriller as a genre. “The secrets that are that are revealed in this are going to be very unfamiliar to people,“ he tells THR. “As a piece of of entertainment, it’s sort of got everything. It’s sexy. It’s scary. It’s visually compelling. It’s got these amazing characters. It’s touching on some really interesting subject matter. I just was was totally hooked.”

Deal with the challenge of adapting a novel where the less an audience knows, the better, most of the work of preserving the story‘s ambiguity happened during post-production, Showalter explains.

“A lot of that was in editing. We did so many different cuts of the movie,” the director says. Each cut was shown to test audiences, then reworked.

“It’s amazing how the tiniest little thing that you do has a huge ripple effect on the way an audience perceives the whole movie,” he says. “Just one tiny moment can change everything.”

The questions he was trying to answer: Did viewers want a reliable character they could trust? Did they want to feel at the end that they’d gotten an answer of what happened and who the bad guys and the good guys were? Through trial and error, he says, “we landed on this uneasy, very ambiguous place. That’s where audiences actually wanted to leave the experience: in a place of uncertainty.”

Small details mattered. Hoover points to the way Lowen (portrayed by Johnson) puts on her sunglasses at the end of one version of the film, which changed how audiences read the ending. Though Hoover says she usually avoids screenings because they make her nervous, this one proved helpful. “Of all the movies I participated in, that part of the audience really helped shape this,” she says.

As in Hoover’s novel, the film’s mystery centers on an unpublished manuscript written by Verity (Hathaway), which Lowen finds while staying with Verity’s husband Jeremy (Hartnett) and son Crew (Brady Wagner). The manuscript ultimately reshapes how she, and the audience, sees everyone around her. Showalter jokingly likens the manuscript to the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. “It’s calling to you. It’s sort of beckoning you to come,” he tells THR. “Then it sort of possesses you, and then you’re screwed.”

With a manuscript also acting as a central character, the challenge was turning the pull of Verity’s words into something visual. Showalter says the story is about writing and reading, and that “generally speaking, watching someone reading a book isn’t the most exciting thing.” His goal was to make Lowen’s reading active, so viewers could feel as though they’re reading alongside her.

That was Hoover’s biggest concern with the book’s adaptation, but Showalter’s execution won her over. “I was most worried about how he was going to portray Lowen reading the manuscript and showing those flashbacks without it being boring or cheesy,” she says. “He did it in such an artistic, beautiful way that I started looking forward to them on screen.”

Verity isn’t the only source of doubt. The film also casts suspicion on Lowen and Jeremy.

Showalter points to the scene where Jeremy admits he lied about Verity having read and loved Lowen’s book. It was actually him who chose Lowen to finish his wife‘s series. Rather than react with outrage, Lowen seems enamored of the revelation, and the next scene they’re shown being intimate with, er, cupcakes and later a bitten headboard (book fans know the one).

“She’s not upset. It tickles some little chord in her,” Showalter says. “It’s almost like she likes it, and you see her start to smirk when he says that. In that moment, I start going, ‘Do I know Lowen as well as I think I do?’ Because he just told her he lied to her in a really big way, and she almost seems turned on by it.”

“You‘re like, ‘Oh wait a second, she’s supposed to be outraged. How could you have done that? How can I trust you now?‘ And instead, she’s like, ‘Let’s get back to the house as soon as humanly possible, so that we can take all our clothes off,“ Showalter laughs.

Later, when Lowen shows Jeremy the manuscript and he confronts his wife over its account of their daughter’s drowning, Verity drops the paralysis act and an enraged Jeremy begins strangling her. Rather than stop him, Lowen instructs him to make it look like an accident.

“By that point, you’re like, OK, she is an unreliable narrator,” Showalter says of Lowen. “It’s like the toothpaste is out of the tube. She’s no longer a character you can trust to get us out of this crazy situation in one piece. Once that happens, we know we’re not on safe ground. We’re on thin ice, literally and figuratively.”

“I don’t trust Lowen. I don’t think Lowen’s well, and I think she sees herself as a victim in all situations, and I definitely don’t trust Jeremy. He goes from zero to crazy angry, real fast,“ Hathaway said, also noting that she‘s team letter.

After Verity is killed and dumped in the lake near their home, Lowen and Jeremy seemingly continue on with a life together. The film ends with a now pregnant Lowen and Jeremy moving into a new home to start their own family, even after she discovers a letter written by Verity. In it, Verity alleges that Jeremy tried to kill her after reading her manuscript — though he acts like he never read it when Lowen had showed it to him — which is why Verity pretended to be paralyzed and planned to escape with their son.

Whether the letter or the manuscript is true, Hoover says, “I don’t think, without Verity’s actions, either way, Jeremy would have turned to that dark place that he turned to. He did it in a protective-father way. So while Lowen is probably going to be a little more suspicious of him, she’s having a child with him, and she loves the way he loved his children, whether the manuscript or the letter was true. It doesn’t justify murder, but they both did murder her.”

Showalter adds, “I think this story is very interesting in terms of morality, and the notion that morality is or isn’t absolute. It’s possible that Jeremy has basically killed Verity twice, but then Lowen thinks his reasons were justifiable, and he’s a good man. What price does someone need to pay for doing something wrong, but for the right reasons? I think that’s another thing that makes these kinds of stories so engaging for an audience: they make us look at parts of ourselves that we don’t normally have to think about.”

For Hoover, Verity herself is the most conflicting character. When the letter is revealed in the film, the audience sees Hathaway’s character in a version of events that looks nothing like the woman in the manuscript or in the present day. “They’re three completely different women,” Hoover says. She credits Showalter’s direction. “I think it doesn’t come off quite that way in the book as when you can see the characters bring it to life.”

“These are characters who live in a very gray area morally,” the director adds. “These characters keep zigging, and when they zig, then they zag.”

Hoover jokes that Showalter knows her book “better than I do.”

“If I ever decide to write another story in this world, I’m going to have to call Michael to refresh my memory,” she says. Showalter volunteers to be her editor, and Hoover suggests a book that follows Crew as “a really messed-up 21-year-old.”

“He would be,” Showalter nods.

Verity is in theaters now.