The Testament of Ann Lee: Mona Fastvold delivers an almost spiritual experience in this musical-biopic

When Ann Lee had her first divine vision, it’s said that the experience was felt with such force that she literally sweated blood. Mona Fastvold’s musical-biopic demands almost as much devotional commitment from Amanda Seyfried, and for the most part she delivers, channelling the 18th-century religious leader through a primal scream of a performance that taps into a rawness we have never seen from her before. 

We meet Lee as a young woman in Manchester, where she becomes a founding member of a sect known as the Shakers, named for their ecstatic worship, in which sin was confessed and absolved through convulsive dance. Filming on handheld 35mm, in Barry Lyndon-style candlelight, Fastvold and cinematographer William Rexer seem to spy on the congregation as they writhe – a murmuration of starlings trying to find formation in the storm. Dust motes dance across Rexer’s chiaroscuro, a reminder of the cotton mill Lee is shown working in as a child, or a nod to the real Ann Lee’s belief that such particles were “specks of angels’ wings”. Gone is the blockbuster-musical gloss associated with Seyfried – here she is joined by the rhapsodic nonprofessional vocals of Phil Minton’s Feral Choir, and sings composer Daniel Blumberg’s experimental reworkings of Shaker hymns. The exhilaration of the prayer scenes transcends the period – these flailing bodies could drop from the sky into Oliver Laxe’s desert raves in Sirāt – the throbbing subwoofer just another source of ecstasy.

In all her features so far, Fastvold has explored domestic unease: women crying out to be understood through erratic somnambulism (The Sleepwalker, 2014), secret queer love (the 18th-century lesbian romance The World to Come, 2022) or, here, religious leadership. Where The World to Come felt reserved and claustrophobic, The Testament of Ann Lee has Fastvold bursting into an epic style of sensorial cinema, where no nerve is left untouched. 

The film follows a cradle-to-grave arc, using an over-literal voiceover taken in part from a real ‘testament’ published by the Shakers after Lee’s death (Lee was actually illiterate, so left no written word). At times this overlaps with the character’s lines, as though Shaker memory and myth are crashing into the director’s interpretation. 

Seyfried’s janky Manchester accent is distracting, but it is movement, more than dialogue or lyrics, that guides the story. Nobody leans on a fence post and bursts into a song that spells out their true feelings. 

Nine devastating years of Lee’s life – when she bore four babies, who all died before they were a year old – are compressed into one sequence, in a horrifying cycle of labour and loss interpreted by Seyfried through the intimate choreography of Celia Rowlson-Hall. How can a person carry so much death and be expected to go on living as before? When Lee has a baroque vision of Adam and Eve’s “fleshy cohabitation” and concludes that abstinence is humanity’s route to salvation, it seems as reasonable a response to the pain as any other. The film doesn’t pass judgement or make assumptions – but I was reminded of Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary Witches (2024), a compassionate exploration of post-partum psychosis which speculated that some women persecuted during the Salem witch trials could have been suffering from the condition. 

Fastvold co-wrote the film with her partner Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist (2024), and this is another story about an immigrant to America, where ‘Mother Ann’ and her followers emigrated in 1774, desperate to build a legacy and share her gift. Both are $10 million budget allegories for the battle of building a radical project in a hostile environment. They also share unexpected moments of humour – with Testament of Ann Lee tipping into Python-level silliness. 

And then there’s the intoxication with craftsmanship (the Shakers continued long after Ann Lee’s death, becoming known for their simple, well-made designs). It’s a shame racial equality within the group is so little explored by comparison, especially given that Fastvold came to Ann Lee’s story through a hymn by the African-American Shaker Patsy Roberts Williamson (depicted here, fleetingly, by Lark White). 

Shooting at the real Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, the director lingers on wood joints and Shaker chairs, showing the members’ toil as inseparable from worship, and there’s a sense the director feels the same way about her craft. She shows the Shakers dancing in concentric circles, now natural and organised as rings on a tree, their frenzied orgiastic prayer a thing of the past; Ann Lee’s vision, taking shape. 

► The Testament of Ann Lee is in UK cinemas 27 February.