The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
There is something genuinely admirable about a film that refuses to make faith legible to sceptics. Mona Fastvold’s sweeping historical musical drama takes as its subject Ann Lee — the Mancunian-born working-class woman who in the 1770s proclaimed herself the female incarnation of Christ and led a small band of believers across the Atlantic to found what would become one of America’s most distinctive utopian communities. The Shakers, as her followers came to be known, worshipped through convulsive singing and dancing, preached gender and social equality at a time when such ideas were considered eccentric at best and treasonous at worst, and practised celibacy with a rigour that mathematically guaranteed their own extinction. History, one might say, has a dark sense of humour.
The film traces Ann’s journey from persecution in England to the promise — and peril — of the New World, where her small community struggles to find its footing before gradually attracting devoted converts. Her refusal to take sides during the American Revolution brings renewed suspicion and violence, and the film does not soften the brutality her followers endure. Narrated in fragmentary form by a figure played by Thomasin McKenzie, the story is told less as biography and more as testament — a form that asks for belief rather than verification, which is either the film’s most honest gesture or its most convenient evasion, depending on your disposition.
Amanda Seyfried is the reason to see this film. She commits absolutely — shaking, weeping, singing with an open-throated fervour that commands the camera’s attention and earns it. There is a particular sequence in which the camera remains fixed on her face for an extended period as she belts out a Shaker spiritual, and it works because she refuses to let it not work. It is the kind of performance that makes you wonder what this actress has been doing in lesser films for the past decade. The answer, apparently, was waiting for this role.
Daniel Blumberg’s score — which incorporates a genuine 18th-century bell discovered in a New York music shop — and Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography give the film its most transcendent passages. The ecstatic movement sequences have a raw, communal energy that suggests what it might feel like to surrender the self to something larger — a feeling that institutions of all kinds have been selling, with varying degrees of sincerity, for centuries.
And yet the film as a whole never quite matches its best moments. The narration, meant to provide context, too often settles for surface summary when the drama beneath is hungry for depth. The theological underpinnings of Shaker belief — their sense of imminent transformation, their radical re-imagining of the divine as equally feminine — are gestured at rather than explored. One leaves the film knowing that Ann Lee was extraordinary without fully understanding why those around her found her irresistible.
Fastvold has crafted something genuinely unusual — a film that insists on the interior logic of religious experience rather than reducing it to sociology. That ambition deserves recognition. But ambition and achievement are not the same thing, and The Testament of Ann Lee falls into that not-uncommon category of films that are easier to admire than to love.