The imposing Vermont home of Verity Crawford serves as a haunting backdrop in the film, but the reality is rooted in New York’s Westchester County. Director Michael Showalter and production designer Amy Williams chose the Beckoning Path house in Armonk, a modernist retreat designed by Danish sculptor Jens Quinsgaard, to embody the author’s eerie presence. This sprawling property, with its angular architecture and V-shaped windows, a nod to the title character, replaced Vermont’s rural isolation with a chilling New York suburbia.
New York City’s Real-Life Settings
The film opens in Brooklyn at Books Are Magic, a beloved local bookstore where protagonist Lowen Ashleigh reads her work. Nearby, a car crash at Park Ave and East 41st Street in Midtown captures Lowen’s fateful encounter with Jeremy Crawford. The Hachette Book Group offices, where Lowen meets her agent Corey, were temporarily transformed into a literary labyrinth, adorned with fictional Verity Crawford book jackets. Colleen Hoover herself makes a cameo as the receptionist, adding a personal touch to the scene.
A dinner meeting at Rolo’s in Ridgewood, Queens, offers a glimpse into Lowen’s world, while flashbacks to a Manhattan bar reveal Verity’s early interactions with Jeremy. Laissez Faire, a cocktail lounge in the Beekman Hotel’s Financial District, provides the perfect setting for their first meeting, complete with a discreet alley exit for a dramatic limousine departure.
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The Beckoning Path House: A Villain’s Lair
Inside the Beckoning Path house, Williams and her team transformed the minimalist space into a writer’s sanctuary. Mirrors concealed bookcases, and pink-hued carpets and desks complemented Anne Hathaway’s complexion, creating a “womb-like and glammy” atmosphere. The house’s lake, used for a canoe scene with Verity and her children, adds a deceptive tranquility to the winter-set narrative. The crew returned in summer to film this moment, contrasting the seasonal shift with the story’s darker tone.
The property’s design reflects its literary purpose, with added walls and bookshelves to evoke an author’s lived-in space. While some rooms were recreated on sound stages, the real kitchen and select areas lent authenticity to the haunting atmosphere. The Beckoning Path house, described as “like a shipwreck at sea,” became the heart of the film’s psychological tension, its very walls whispering secrets of Verity’s past.
Summer Filming and Seasonal Contrasts
The crew’s return to the Beckoning Path house in summer for the canoe scene creates a jarring temporal dissonance that amplifies the narrative’s psychological tension. While the majority of the film unfolds during winter months, capturing Verity’s children on the lake requires the property’s natural water feature and demands a complete seasonal wardrobe shift. This deliberate contrast between frozen ground and open water mirrors the story’s central conflict between surface normalcy and underlying corruption.