Hot on the heels of “The Brutalist,” Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet have returned with another sweeping historical epic about a European iconoclast who comes to America in order to build a new kind of church. Even more excitingly, “The Testament of Ann Lee” — a speculative, feverish, and altogether rapturous biopic about the Mancunian preacher who founded the Shakers and believed herself to be the female incarnation of Christ on Earth — addresses the most glaring problem with last year’s story about the fictional architect László Tóth: It wasn’t a musical.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” isn’t exactly a musical either, to be fair. Sure, its characters are prone to singing and dancing when the spirit grabs them (a divinely heightened play on the “Quaking Shakers’” full-body approach to religious devotion), but the film’s euphoric “movements” cleave a lot closer to prayers than to traditional numbers. Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg transfigures a dozen traditional hymns into propulsive and electrifying choral jams that thrum with biblical fervor, while “Aftersun” choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall rearranges the figures of Ann Lee’s close-knit congregation until they form a human alter to the heaven their “mother” is hoping to create with them here on Earth.
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As in a more straightforward musical, the Shakers are using song and dance to express a range of feelings that plainspoken words couldn’t hope to convey. But the exultation of these movements, and of the rest of Fastvold’s film beyond them — which, like “The Brutalist,” she co-wrote with life partner Corbet — has much less to do with any lyrical content than it does with the elation of collective harmony. With the orgiastic glory of creating a shared purpose between people, and the evangelical labor of converting that purpose into action.
Fastvold may not be a Shaker herself, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering that there are exactly three of them remaining at last count (and only then because a new adherent joined the other two just a few weeks ago), but “The Testament of Ann Lee” is one of the most consistently ecstatic movies I’ve ever seen precisely because it doesn’t get hung up on the gospel truth. This is a film defined by a profound respect for its namesake’s faith, but it’s also a film driven by an even more profound appreciation for the more secular ideals that she leveraged her faith to pursue; it’s remarkable as a testament of Ann Lee, and even more so as a testament to her quasi-artistic ability to marshal people together in the service of creating a better world.
In a sense, “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a celebration of — and then in its less rhapsodic second half, a plea for — the conditions required to make a movie like “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Here is another mad pursuit with shallow pockets and grand ambitions (which looks like a mega-budgeted studio project thanks to production designer Sam Bader). It’s another utopian prayer led by a woman in a business dominated by men, a woman who, in Fastvold’s case, had to harness the energies of a crew much larger than Ann Lee’s initial congregation in order to fulfill her vision. Like “The Brutalist” before it (to say nothing of Fastvold’s heart-wrenchingly great “The World to Come” before that), the film doubles as a workable alternative for how films might be made. Just as Ann Lee’s upbeat message appealed to a Christian population that had grown tired of being promised salvation through suffering, Fastvold and Corbet’s model offers a more actionable response to an industry sick of Hollywood doomsayers.
Then again, it takes a lot more than a few cheap Hungarian budget hacks to conjure the kind of spell that Fastvold does here. For starters, there’s only one Amanda Seyfried, whose moonstone eyes were made to convey religious bliss. The “First Reformed” actress gives the best performance of her career as “The Woman Clothed by the Sun,” her Ann Lee convincingly yearning for purpose even before she begins to create one for herself.
Set in the gray and unforgiving Manchester of 1736, the first section of this movie is the story of a wayward soul trying to find a harmony between God (who she loves) and the church (which doesn’t love her back). She finds a measure of creature comfort in the arms of her smitten but severe husband Abraham (a terrific Christopher Abbott, masterfully navigating real affection and 18th century male entitlement), who ravishes Ann with a fetishistic attention that his bride isn’t sure how to receive. For one thing, she’s young and uneducated. For another, even worldly sinners like us would probably be confused if our partners wanted to smack our bare asses with a broom while reading from the Book of Revelations.
But Ann’s sexual ambivalence runs far deeper than old-timey kink. She first became skeptical of the subject as a little girl, when she was forced to watch her father grunt on top of her mother just a few feet away, and that skepticism began to calcify into a deeper mistrust when her mother died during the delivery of her eighth child. For a woman like Ann, marital sex is a crucial part of affirming her Christian duty, but the sense of self-becoming that it provides is rhymed by the autonomy that “belonging” to her husband strips away from her in return.
These conflicted feelings come to a head in the film’s most astonishing sequence, a whirlstorm of sex, labor, dance, anguish, song, death, and mourning in which Ann delivers four children, none of whom survive beyond infancy despite her desperate attempts to feed them with life. The choreography here is breathtakingly evocative; heightened but not unreal, modern but true to the spirit of the Georgian era, as suspended between modes as Ann is between this world and the next. Needless to say, the experience has a soul-scarring effect on Ann, who becomes convinced that her awful ordeal is punishment for her sins of the flesh. “Our unbearable tragedies are God’s judgment upon me,” she concludes before declaring that procreation is sacrilege and leading the first Shakers in three days of spasmodic worship so intense that Sister Mary (Thomasin McKenzie) — Ann’s most devoted acolyte and this movie’s narrator — insists that people thought she was going to die.
Carefully balanced between agony and ecstasy before it gradually begins to claw its way closer toward the latter, Seyfried’s possessed performance has no trouble selling us on the credibility of those fears. She’s a study in unbridled expiation, her body open and tilting upwards to the sky as if she were receiving instruction from the heavens, her every rhythmic breath a kind of transubstantiation.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” would never hold together if not for the unwavering conviction that Seyfried affords its title character. Since a film made for Shakers would only stand to gross about $40 at most, Fastvold understands that most viewers won’t share Ann’s self-beliefs; what’s more important is that we believe that Ann does. We may come to a more psychological rationale for her prophetic awakening, which is clearly borne from the pain of her losses, but we’re also disabused of any cynicism regarding the sincerity of her faith (even if, uh, we might question the long-term outcome of a religion that forbids its followers to start families and fortify their ranks).
The people closest to Ann, especially her young brother William (a terrific Louis Pullman, sturdy and receptive to the idea of a sibling Christ 2.0), have no trouble accepting hers as the only truth, and so the movie’s spectacular-looking second act takes to the seas as Mother Ann and her two dozen adherents set sail for the New World, whose faith was still unformed. The boat set is where William Rexer’s 35mm cinematography really begins to shine, as the Caravaggio-like interiors of the first act contrast against the violent gray-blue seas that threaten to capsize the ship and drown Ann’s upstart religion in one fell swoop. The journey is a perilous one between two mutually antagonized lands, but the Shakers’ shared purpose proves to be their salvation, and sees them safely to Manhattan.
It’s there, on the shores of pre-Revolutionary America, that “The Testament of Ann Lee” most neatly dovetails with “The Brutalist,” as Fastvold begins to exalt in the promise of a country still waiting to be born. America’s self-invention runs parallel to Ann’s, and rhymes with it in all of its aspiration and strife. If (like “The Brutalist”), the second half of this film is a much slower, darker, and less dynamic meditation on the events of the first, it’s also where Fastvold and Corbet’s script begins to lament how America has always been so eager to snuff out the idealist spark that is — or was — capable of making it such a beacon of hope for the rest of the world.
Through the lens of the nascent Shaker community that Ann establishes near Albany (and where she instructs her followers to begin making the furniture they’re still remembered for today), we see this country as a place built on the strength of cooperation, as well as a place vulnerable to the same provincial thinking from which it was hoping to declare independence. The Shakers thrive by trading with the local indigenous population, and from offering new ideas to frustrated white colonialists who’d been conditioned for despair (embodied here by Tim Blake Nelson). They also suffer at the hands of brutish mobs who reject their presence on principle, oblivious to the irony of so violently betraying the same rights they’ve just fought a war to establish. A tale as old as time.
Grace is a difficult thing to preserve, and “The Testament of Ann Lee” becomes a less viscerally singular experience as it transitions from sanctifying that grace to grieving it. The music grows less frequent, we begin to see Daniel Blumberg onscreen (a striking figure!) as much as we hear from him off it, and the clarity of Ann’s vision is clouded by the brutishness that surrounds it. As in most stories, the inevitable isn’t as compelling as the miraculous, and there’s an exasperation — however necessary and/or deliberate — in watching the last act of Fastvold’s film deprive us of the contagious ecstasy that carried so much of the first two, as if a movie so guided by voices has suddenly lost its tongue.
Of course, Ann would be quick to remind us that there’s a place for everything, and everything in its place. The ultimate brilliance of Fastvold’s movie, which remains without question for all of its peaks and valleys, is that it has the courage to reimagine the essence of belonging itself; to see it not as something we find, but rather as something that we create together.
Grade: A-
“The Testament of Ann Lee” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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