What role do ambition and daring play in contemporary cinema? The Testament of Ann Lee, helmed by Mona Fastvold, stands apart from any film you’ve experienced, for better or worse. A musical depicting the founder of an 18th-century religious movement, a woman who championed a Utopian vision while asserting that celibacy was the only route to divine grace? This isn’t a concept designed to draw crowds. Yet in an age where we’re spoon-fed simplified information daily, as though we can’t be trusted to muster even a spark of imagination, The Testament of Ann Lee encourages us to exercise our remaining mental faculties. The film may prove to be merely a finely crafted oddity, yet it claims one characteristic that many massive-budget blockbusters don’t: it’s never dull.
stars as Lee, and the picture opens at its origins—the narrative is delivered, storybook-fashion, by one of the movie’s minor roles, ’s Mary Partington—detailing her 1736 birth in Manchester, England, and her upbringing alongside her devoted brother, William. Lee is an obedient, serene, pious girl, toiling diligently at her loom with a cloth guarding her face from inhaling loose threads. Yet she resents her mother’s continuous childbearing—it’s difficult to enumerate the offspring assembled at the family’s crude wooden table, likely surpassing twelve—and she shrewdly associates this difficulty with her parents’ marital relations, impossible to conceal in their tight living conditions. Subsequently, she marries, and while initially accepting of physical intimacy, her blacksmith spouse, (Christopher Abbott’s Abraham), supposedly uncovers indecent material at his job and entices her into sexual practices that unsettle her. This presumably influences her eventual conviction that abstinence is the proper path.
Yet Lee’s religious commitment transcends psychological matters. She joins a sect of “Shaking Quakers,” congregants whose rituals involve chanting, wailing, and spontaneous, rapturous dancing. Her belief is so passionate and magnetic that soon she attracts her own disciples, who will be known as . They’ll dub her Mother; her sibling William (portrayed by Lewis Pullman) will serve as her chief lieutenant. Prior to all this, however, Lee becomes pregnant and miscarries four times, with a sequence depicting this era that is direct and impactful. At one moment, we witness, in a tactfully reverent wide shot, Lee’s Abraham delicately attempting to take a deceased newborn from Lee’s embrace; she seems unable to release the child.
Lee grows increasingly firm in her vision of religious life, and her congregation expands. She encounters harassment and accusations of sorcery; she is imprisoned multiple times. In 1774, she and her devoted band embark on a derelict vessel bound for North America, establishing themselves in upstate New York. They aim to create a community where gender equality reigns, where all labor diligently according to their capacity, and where resources are distributed collectively. Once more, sexual activity is prohibited. It’s understandable why observers deemed the Shakers strange and extreme, and further oppression, including lethal violence, ensues.
Fastvold navigates this occasionally harsh narrative elegantly, intermittently inserting musical sequences. The compositions, crafted by Daniel Blumberg and based on Shaker spirituals, address themes of dedication, industry, and spiritual yearning; the dance movements, devised by Celia Rowlson-Hall and rooted in Shaker ceremonial tradition, exhibit a certain Twyla Tharp-like sharpness and intensity. If you appreciate Shaker craftsmanship, furniture, design, and the overall, you must wait until roughly the two-thirds mark for relevant scenes. Yet if I were marketing Ann Lee in William Castle fashion, I’d employ the slogan, “No audience member will remain seated during the bold Shaker-box-crafting sequence!” This represents the film’s strangest, most outstanding segment, accompanied by a piece whose repetitive refrain is “I love Mother, I love her way,” creating a trance-like effect that is simultaneously calming and disturbing.
As a figure, Lee, with her firm declarations regarding self-denial and constancy, occasionally proves unbearable, though the film fails to perceive this: it stays captivated by her virtue and purity, even when she warrants skepticism. Fundamentally adoring in its perspective on Lee, the picture never concedes that an individual commanding such unrestrained veneration is somewhat unsettling. (The screenplay was penned by Fastvold and her spouse and regular partner Brady Corbet; their previous work was The Brutalist.)
Yet the reality that Lee is female, though a powerful, resolute one, truly matters. Conventionally, history suggests that charisma belongs to men; women are left with that inferior trait referred to broadly and indistinctly as charm. The Testament of Ann Lee transcends such terminology, narrating a tale that remains untold, via an approach seldom attempted by directors. And it must be said: Seyfried delivers an exceptional performance. Her lunar-maiden gaze genuinely suggests she is transmitting communications from a celestial realm. She transforms the screenplay’s most awkward dialogue into golden threads. The Testament of Ann Lee would be inconceivable with a different leading lady—though in truth, it’s inconceivable altogether, a work that embraces major risks within a cultural climate that typically rejects them.
