The aim of most period pieces is to make the past familiar. To draw a line between the way people used to live and the way they do now\u2014to hunt for continuity in the human experience. But writer-director Mona Fastvold has a different goal in mind with her historical drama The Testament Of Ann Lee. What if the past vibrated on such a different frequency that it almost felt like a foreign world? What if it literally sang?\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the ethos of a film that does, ultimately, find continuity in the human experience, but takes a bold, disorienting path to get there. Shot on 70mm and starring a mesmerizing Amanda Seyfried as the titular founder of the Shaker religion<\/a>, The Testament Of Ann Lee captures how ecstatic 18th-century religious experiences felt for those inside of them, rather than how they looked from the outside. That means transforming the trembling reveries of the \u201cShaking Quakers\u201d into full-on musical numbers full of rhythmic breathing and percussive dancing; lilting choral ballads with a dash of the moaning circle from Midsommar<\/a>. And it also means casting an honest eye on the brutal realities of the past. At a time when it was not uncommon for a woman to lose four babies before their first birthdays, religion served less as a set of moral principles than as a mast to which one could lash themselves just to survive.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the experience of Ann Lee, the second-oldest of eight siblings born during an era of Evangelical revival in England. Unsettled by \u201cfleshly cohabitation\u201d and yearning to \u201cfind purpose amidst the dullness of her lot,\u201d she turns to a burgeoning Shaker movement known for plaintive public confessions and, more notably, for allowing women to be preachers. In fact, the Shakers believe God is both male and female\u2014a radical ideology for Manchester in the mid-1700s. And after Ann experiences \u201castonishing visions and divine manifestations\u201d during a hunger strike in prison, she leaves convinced of two things: fornication is the cause of all evil, and she\u2019s the second coming of Christ.<\/p>\n Fastvold and Seyfried understand there\u2019s a touch of a cult leader to Ann, who declares that all Shakers must take a vow of celibacy to purify their sins. Her power of persuasion is strong enough that she inspires her younger brother William (Lewis Pullman) and a small group of Shakers to leave their lives behind and start anew in America, where she believes the New World\u2019s minds will be more malleable to her ideas. The bright, wide eyes and trilling soprano that have previously made Seyfried such a winning ing\u00e9nue are here used to convey a bone-deep intensity and unwavering commitment to her beliefs. \u201cI am commissioned by the Almighty God to preach the everlasting gospel to America. And an angel commanded me, here, to this house,\u201d she monologues when an innkeeper says hello.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet The Testament Of Ann Lee also takes a non-judgmental approach to understanding Ann as she might have understood herself. Seyfried\u2019s aching performance suggests there\u2019s something of a trauma response in Ann\u2019s call for celibacy\u2014a desire to reclaim a sense of agency for women at a time when their bodies weren\u2019t their own. Though she\u2019s adamant that anyone who refuses to remain celibate must leave the group, she\u2019s equally adamant that her followers must be allowed to choose the path freely rather than be pressured into it. She abhors slavery, values hard work and community, believes children are born without sin, and encourages pacifism instead of war. \u201cOur altar is love,\u201d the Shakers quite literally howl at the moon between building beautiful churches in secluded meadows. Ann\u2019s philosophy is both radical and wholesome all at once. Naturally, it\u2019s not long before someone is calling her a witch.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s a duality to Ann\u2019s life, just as there\u2019s a duality to the Shakers themselves\u2014a religion where God is double-gendered; where love is encouraged but sex is forbidden; where the very nature of the faith means new members will never be born into it. Fastvold observes those dichotomies without trying to rectify them. Instead, The Testament Of Ann Lee embraces that sense of duality too. Narration from loyal follower Sister Mary (Thomasin McKenzie) lays out the facts of Ann\u2019s life like a straightforward biopic, while the movie itself is much weirder\u2014filled with unforgettable sequences like a ship-set prayer dance that spans multiple weather conditions or a harrowing montage of sex, birth, and death (both courtesy of choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall and composer Daniel Blumberg). The script by Fastvold and her partner, The Brutalist<\/a> director Brady Corbet, commits to an impressive level of historical formality in its language and relationship dynamics. Yet the whole project feels distinctly modern in its sheer formal experimentalism.<\/p>\n The frenzied, lustful energy of the film\u2019s first half makes it one of the most thrilling cinematic experiences of the year and, though the slower, more mannered second half struggles to recapture that same sense of propulsion, there\u2019s a purpose to that too. As Fastvold sees it, Ann was a woman born into a dirty, chaotic world who yearned for a sense of order and peace\u2014and she fought tooth and nail to claim it for herself. In doing so, she also managed to give a nascent religion the structure it would need to thrive beyond her death (if not quite into today). Even more so than her religious principles, Ann\u2019s true gospel is the idea of \u201ca place for everything and everything in its place.\u201d And though The Testament Of Ann Lee doesn\u2019t demand devotion to that ideology, it sure as hell respects the conviction.<\/p>\n Director: Mona Fastvold
Writer: Mona Fastvold, Brady Corbet
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott, Stacy Martin, Matthew Beard, Scott Handy, Viola Prettejohn, Jamie Bogyo, David Cale
Release Date: December 25, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The aim of most period pieces is to make the past familiar. To draw a line between the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-369314","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}