A musical biopic fittingly composed of religious ballads, The Testament of Ann Lee chronicles the life of its eponymous 18th century religious leader, played with tremendous passion by Amanda Seyfried. It spans several decades and traces Ann’s travels from Manchester to New York as well as the newly-invented religious dogmas that guided her journey. It’s a film of spiritual ecstasy that lives on the edge of realism – for better and for worse – while mythologizing an oft-forgotten historical figure whose unusual beliefs about celibacy had altruistic ends, making for a particularly compelling experience.
Directed by The Brutalist co-writer Mona Fastvold and co-written by that film’s director and other co-writer, Brady Corbet, The Testament of Ann Lee arrives with all the lush historical detail you’d expect, made even more inviting by William Rexer’s 70mm cinematography. It begins with a decontextualized vista of women in bonnets and religious robes moving rhythmically in the woods in the late 1700s. This image, removed from time, is all that’s known to most people about the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, also known as the “Shakers,” a particularly enduring Christian sect – their number recently rose to 3. Ann was once their prophet, one of the rare female figures of such importance at the time.
One of these dancing women, Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), is both a key supporting character in the film as well as its narrator, providing conflicting accounts of Ann’s life but ultimately deciding which parts of her story are worth telling… and believing. It’s a film about the reinterpretation of doctrine that is itself reinterpreted for the audience by a woman invested in making Ann (affectionately called “Mother” by her worshippers) seem like the Second Coming. Regardless of what the filmmakers themselves believe – Fastvold was raised in a secular household – they present The Testament of Ann Lee as though it were an article of faith, making it particularly intoxicating.
In her childhood and early adult years, Ann is seen to have a complicated relationship with her body and beliefs, from her revulsion towards sex to the movie’s sudden flashes of visceral biblical imagery; brief inserts of Renaissance paintings depicting Eden feature particularly phallic snakes. As she molds her own outlook, she and her supportive brother William (Lewis Pullman) join the Shakers in their early days, attending closed-door meetings involving confessions in the form of song, and exorcising sin through writhing and rhythmic thumping. It’s a time of great religious upheaval; Methodism has just been born, the Church of England is entwined with state power and cruel penalties, and the Shakers worship in secret.
Seyfried sells Ann’s unshakable zeal with tremendous gusto, turning in a career-best performance.
After marrying fellow congregant Abraham (Christopher Abbott), Ann’s experimentations with sex and BDSM leave her spiritually unfulfilled. As the years go by, she bears four different children, all of whom die before the age of one, resulting in a pervading grief that informs the way she eventually reshapes the Shaker church. The film frames Ann’s mourning as not only a key to her rejection of carnal impulse, but the foundation of her self-proclaimed divinity. Her visions, she claims, come to her in moments of mania, like when she’s imprisoned for her beliefs, and likely ill and dehydrated. However, the film finds no need to employ a skeptical lens to its chronology. Instead, the camera buys into Lee’s theological stature, and the frame becomes enraptured by the Shakers’ ritualistic motions, capturing worshippers in alternating close-ups and panoramas as they beat their chests with open palms.
The songs and movements, drawn from real Shaker music, are acoustically addicting, even when the people singing don’t have particularly dulcet tones. Your mileage may vary, but this is part of the film’s commitment to naturalistic performance. Not every churchgoer would be a professional singer, though each member of the flock is fully devoted to Ann’s premonitions of a better world, free from tyranny and cruelty. It’s hard not to agree with her objective, even if the notion of lifelong celibacy seems strange or self-defeating.
The film’s ensemble is wonderfully fine-tuned, especially Tim Blake Nelson and Jamie Bogyo as elder churchgoers who – in a decision that feels almost countercultural despite the Shakers’ conservative constraints – yield to the word of a young woman. This faith eventually leads the Shakers across the Atlantic to the New World, where they remain largely apolitical, but invite the consequences of doing so during the Revolutionary War. However, As Ann’s convictions grow stronger, Abraham wavers, testing each of their commitments to the cause of an abstract utopia with no clear path beyond what Christ allegedly tells her.
Seyfried, however, sells Ann’s unshakable zeal with tremendous gusto, turning in a career-best performance as a woman who emerges from the throes of anguish so convinced of herself that she believes with every fiber of her being that her conception of the world and its suffering is the right one, and that everyone deserves a part of her, though they must partake willingly. However, if there’s a downside to the movie’s framing of Ann through Mary’s eyes, it’s that her conception as a holy figure yields a narrative in which she’s rarely tempted to stray from her path, offering little by way of dramatic tension as the film plays out.
There’s nothing especially cruel about the Shakers, other than how they excommunicate members who break their rules concerning fornication. That aside, being immersed in their world for two hours and change verges on liberating, especially during scenes of percussive prayer. The instrumentation by composer Daniel Blumberg remains largely faithful to what one might have heard at the time, but when characters like William get swept up in the word of Mother Ann – Pullman, in these moments, gives himself over to the film completely – the rules break, and the music cracks through space and time with electric guitars luring the Shakers into the future. That they don’t make it to the 19th century in one piece, owing to violent eruptions, feels incredibly tragic by the end.
