The Testament of Ann Lee <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 <\/p>\n
Director: Mona Fastvold<\/p>\n
Cert: 15A<\/p>\n
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Lewis Pullman, Christopher Abbott, Tim Blake Nelson, Thomasin McKenzie, Stacy Martin, Matthew Beard<\/p>\n
Running Time: 2 hrs 16 mins<\/p>\n
How appropriate that this study<\/a> of the woman who founded the Shaker sect asks a significant leap of faith from approaching viewers. It is one thing to invite empathy with an 18th century mystic whose cult invited its own annihilation by shunning all copulation. It is another to tell that story through the medium of a lolloping, incantatory musical that borrows tunes from the movement\u2019s own hymns. Religion<\/a> is not a big draw to contemporary audiences. And just think how people who hate musicals love to broadcast that dislike.<\/p>\n No matter. Little you have seen before will prepare you for the emotional sweep of The Testament of Ann Lee. True, Mona Fastvold<\/a>, who co-wrote The Brutalist with her partner Brady Corbet, has travelled some of this ground already. The new film, shot on rich 35mm stock by William Rexer, again takes a harrowed idealist from oppression in Europe to life as forger of legends in the New World. But this is a grainier, weirder, more unearthly project than The Brutalist. It digs deep into forgotten spiritual origins.<\/p>\n The project would be inconceivable without a remarkable performance from an apparently possessed Amanda Seyfried<\/a>. We first meet her as a harassed, beleaguered young woman in the developing Cottonopolis that was Manchester. She and her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), find themselves drawn to a division of Methodists committed to ecstatic, celebratory worship. It requires no great psychological insight to make inspired guesses at the origins of Ann\u2019s antipathy to carnal lust: her husband reveals colourful sexual preferences; each of her four children dies in infancy. Nor does one need a premature Freud to explain sexual sublimation in the sect\u2019s tumbling, rapturous ceremonies. <\/p>\n