{"id":108384,"date":"2025-09-02T04:47:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T04:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/108384\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T04:47:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T04:47:09","slug":"what-the-critics-are-saying-about-the-testament-of-ann-lee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/108384\/","title":{"rendered":"What The Critics Are Saying About \u2018The Testament Of Ann Lee\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Testament of Ann Lee<\/a>, the latest feature from Mona Fastvold, launched at the Venice<\/a> Film Festival this evening, and the notices are rolling in.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe musical film stars Amanda Seyfried as charismatic 18th-century religious leader Ann Lee, who founded the Shaker movement, known for its ecstatic singing and dancing as well as, later, its simple furniture and architecture. The Brutalist<\/a> filmmaker Brady Corbet<\/a> co-wrote the film with Fastvold.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe early reaction from critics on the Lido has been mostly positive, with several reviews clocking the film at 3 stars and highlighting its narrative experiments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDeadline\u2019s Damon Wise described the film as \u201cstrange and oddly visceral.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cReuniting three of the main factors of the success of The Brutalist<\/a> \u2014 Fastvold plus composer Daniel Blumberg and writer\/producer Brady Corbet<\/a> \u2014 The Testimony of Ann Lee plays like a light yin to that film\u2019s dark yang, telling a similar but much warmer story of troubled genius, social torment, and escape,\u201d Wise wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThough she\u2019s clearly some kind of fruitcake, Ann has optimism, compassion, and life, which Fastvold reveals in a series of mesmerizing musical numbers taken from real Shaker scriptures. It also helps to have Amanda Seyfried in the leading role; showing a whole new side to herself, Seyfried makes for a very credible messiah, and an earth mother with a great natural gift.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tVogue magazine highlighted what it described as the \u201cmany similarities\u201d between The Testament of Ann Lee\u00a0and\u00a0The Brutalist. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBoth are far too long \u2013 though,\u00a0Ann Lee\u00a0is, remarkably, nearly an hour and a half shorter than\u00a0The Brutalist\u00a0\u2013 and start strong before eventually losing their way in their final act,\u201d the magazine wrote. \u201cBut both, with their extraordinary imagery, visceral power and almost reckless ambition also demand to be seen and dissected.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Variety, Guy Lodge said the film is respectful and intellectually curious, even if dramatically, it can pall across the course of a languid 136-minute runtime.\u201d However, Lodge said the film is \u201cmost stunningly persuasive\u201d when thought of as a \u201cfull-blown song-and-dance affair.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDiscussing the film\u2019s aesthetics, The Guardian said it \u201clooks sometimes like a Lars von Trier nightmare of ironised martyrdom, or a Robert Eggers horror film like The Witch, and then sometimes like a weird but spectacular Broadway musical melodrama.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe newspaper gave the film an overall three stars and praised it\u2019s philosophical ambitions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain,\u201d the newspaper wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLittle White Lies described the film as \u201cimpressive and admirable,\u201d but concludes that it \u201cnever quite finds an emotional pull in the way that Fastvold\u2019s previous film, The World to Come, did.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a nuanced review, Cineuropa described The Testament of Ann Lee as a \u201cmeticulously crafted film\u201d about faith that \u201cnever veers into overly praising Mother Ann as a feminist icon ahead of her time, and it doesn\u2019t make a huge deal out of her understanding of gender and racial equality in 18th-century England and colonial America.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe outlet said the film \u201ckeeps just the right amount of distance to grant us the joy and delight of storytelling \u2013 thoroughly researched, rendered and delivered with the convictions of the cinema to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIndiewire also highlighted the film\u2019s structure, describing the narrative as \u201ccarefully balanced between agony and ecstasy\u201d. The magazine said it is all held together by the \u201cunwavering conviction that Seyfried affords its title character.\u201d The outlet gave the film an A- grade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Testament of Ann Lee, the latest feature from Mona Fastvold, launched at the Venice Film Festival this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,52180,56,54,55,10989,52580],"class_list":["post-108384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-the-testament-of-ann-lee","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-venice","tag-venice-film-fesival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}