‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ Review: Amanda Seyfried Leads a Devotional, Dance-Driven Portrait of Faith and Utopia

Closer to an opera or a stern Broadway musical than to a conventional film, The Testament of Ann Lee is an intense, imposing audiovisual experience, clearly designed to deliver a mystical-religious impact on the viewer akin to what the protagonists of this biopic undergo. It tells the story of the founder of the Shakers—the common name for what would later be officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. This church still exists today, with very few adherents, and is best known for the way its members “dance” during prayer: a mix of convulsion and physical trembling that director Mona Fastvold transforms into choreographed sequences set to music by Daniel Blumberg.

Co-written with her husband Brady Corbet, The Testament… shares a similar tonal ambition with The Brutalist. While the stories themselves are very different—what they most clearly share is an interest in immigrant experiences in the United States and the challenges of adaptation—both films reach for a kind of formal grandiosity in the way they combine mise-en-scène and music, creating the sense that the viewer is undergoing something more imposing than a simple movie. The major difference is that Fastvold’s film seeks to envelop the spectator in a devotional experience, as if ushering them into a religious ceremony populated by people who sing, dance, and perform choreographies in honor of God and His/Her representative on Earth.

That representative is Ann Lee—or rather, her “second appearing.” Played by Amanda Seyfried—in a performance somewhat bafflingly ignored by the Oscars—Ann Lee is a young woman from Manchester who, in the mid-18th century, becomes interested in the peculiar practices of a revisionist religious group that enters into trance during prayer and proclaims that the Messiah will be a woman. Deeply disturbed since childhood by the concept of “original sin” after witnessing her parents having sex and interpreting it as a form of violent abuse, Ann enthusiastically joins the group alongside her brother William (Lewis Pullman) and her niece Nancy. There she meets Abraham (Christopher Abbott), a man whose sexual appetites are very different from her own. Despite this, she marries him, and in a brutal musical sequence we see her bear several children in quick succession—most of whom die either during childbirth or in infancy.

Divided into solemn chapters, the film charts Ann Lee’s evolution within the church: her rise to spiritual leadership (soon to become Mother Ann Lee), her mystical experiences in prison, her doctrinal decisions—absolute celibacy being the most controversial—her conflicts with authorities, and, in the second half, the decision to leave for the United States with a small group to establish their own parish there. That experience proves demanding, complex, and unexpectedly brutal from the very voyage across the Atlantic. Amid this otherwise fairly classical narrative, Fastvold devotes considerable time to the religious choreographies performed during prayer, but also uses them in a more recognizably musical mode: as expressions of her characters’ dreams, fears, and desires.

Of all the film’s distinctive qualities, perhaps the most striking is the respectful seriousness with which it approaches Ann Lee and the Shakers. Though their customs may appear peculiar or even extravagant, Fastvold presents them as devout, sensitive, humane believers—opposed to slavery and possessed of an unusually close relationship to nature for religious sects of the time. At moments—aside from the “small detail” of celibacy—they can seem like a proto-hippie commune (think The Farm), devoted to agriculture, horizontal social organization, and a utilitarian approach to furniture design that might not look out of place in a modern IKEA catalog. This almost devotional tone is surprising within a genre of religious biopics that, since the 1950s, has tended toward far more critical perspectives.

While there are internal conflicts, questionable attitudes, and an undeniable degree of mystical fervor on the part of Ann and her followers, Fastvold shows little interest in debunking them or uncovering some dark secret behind their traditions. In its own way, the film plays as a celebration of a religious worldview sidelined by far more powerful institutional interests that repeatedly hindered its growth and expansion. The Shakers were hardly the only church of this kind to emerge in the late 18th and 19th centuries—some, in fact, would later evolve into private companies—but perhaps they offered the most striking features, and the closest resemblance—through the physical, emotional, communal experience of their ceremonies—to Afro-Christian churches.

Fastvold functions here as a kind of Ann Lee figure within the film itself, spearheading an enormous and undoubtedly difficult production that will leave no one indifferent and that—stretching the parallel between cinema and church—was entirely ignored by the “authorities” (in this case, the members of the Academy who vote on the Oscars). The film’s power is undeniable, anchored by a seemingly possessed Seyfried who marches forward at her own pace and according to her own convictions even as everything turns against her.

There’s something of the epic western in its portrait of community-building, albeit one very different from the more traditional groups that emigrated from Europe to the United States in the country’s formative years. Its strange utopianism emerges as an alternative way of understanding religion to the one that remains dominant today. And while many aspects of Shaker life have filtered into contemporary culture in unexpected ways, it’s clear that Fastvold sees this mystical group—led by the messianic Ann Lee—as a lost opportunity to conceive of spiritual connection in more physical, perhaps even purer terms.

Visually striking, shot on 35mm, and featuring a score of mounting intensity by the award-winning composer of The Brutalist, Fastvold’s film has all the makings of a future cult classic—something its neglect by the Academy will likely only reinforce. Or else it may end up like one of those Broadway musical spectacles that eventually become contradictory commercial tourist attractions for years on end. As they themselves would say: “there is a place for everything, and everything in its place.” Perhaps that will be its place as well.