Those of us who first understood Shakerism not as a religious movement but as a mail-order furniture company — like a particularly elegant, artisanal version of Ikea — have much to learn from “The Testament of Ann Lee,” and a bit to unlearn too. Ascetic simplicity, the quality most conventionally associated with the vanishing Christian sect, is not exactly the order of the day in director Mona Fastvold‘s blazingly ambitious and busy portrait of its founding mother, which oscillates dynamically between the modes of intrepid New World epic and expressionistic musical.
If the results are as bracingly eccentric as that description promises, they’re also less ironic than you might think. Fastvold and her co-writer/creative partner Brady Corbet may maintain a cool, analytical distance in their study of an extreme religious movement founded on challenging principles of celibacy and utopian equality, but “The Testament of Ann Lee” isn’t a travesty or a mockery. As a study of unyielding faith practiced on wholly singular terms, it’s raptly respectful and intellectually curious, even if dramatically, it can pall across the course of a languid 136-minute runtime. But it’s as a full-blown song-and-dance affair — about the least likely, biggest-swinging shape Lee’s story could taken — that the film is most stunningly persuasive.
First a caveat: There are no jazz hands in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” though Celia Rowlson-Hall’s startling choreography serves up restless limbs and clawing digits aplenty. Nor are the songs melodically Broadway-ready: Instead, they’re artfully adapted by Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg (“The Brutalist”) from old Shaker spirituals, embedded in a changeable, exhilarating soundscape of discordant strings, tingly metallic percussion and shrill choral wave .
But the musical vernacular is invigorating, caught between quaint historical immersion and reckless anachronism in a way that’s reflected throughout Fastvold’s filmmaking, from mise-en-scène to performance style. (Her previous film, 2020’s stark 19th-century lesbian romance “The World to Come,” prepared us for this clash of eras and sensibilities in a far lower key.) Austere antiquity is in constant conflict with more sensual, modern impulses — a tension that feels productive applied to a story of the Shakers, puritans whom time has proven too pure for this world.
On paper, this might all sound quite bloodless and conceptual. In practice, it has an earnest, full-hearted sweep, in large part thanks to a performance of redoubtable commitment and nerve-deep feeling by Amanda Seyfried — far from the musical terrain of either “Mamma Mia!” or “Les Misérables,” but fully in command of her gifts — in the title role. After a stylized prologue (or overture, if you will) that sees a junior Shaker acolyte (Thomasin McKenzie) leading a kind of body-knotting memorial ceremony for the late founder in a Niskayuna forest, we rewind to Lee’s working-class childhood in mid-18th-century Manchester, England, where poverty and paternal abuse combined to give the young girl (played first by Esmee Hewett, then Millie Rose Crossley) a preternaturally stoic demeanor — along with a horror of “fleshly cohabitation” yielded by early, traumatic sightings of her parents doing the deed.
She finds comfort in her intense bond with her younger brother William (Benjamin Bagota, then Harry Conway), and even more so in her ardent, unwavering Christian faith. This leads her as a young woman to a more aberrantly devout sect led by Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin) and her preacher husband James (Scott Handy), informally named the “Shaking Quakers” for their practice of violently trembling, seizure-like dancing at gatherings, believed to cleanse the body of sin. She marries rough-hewn laborer Abraham (an excellent Christopher Abbott) and births four children, all of whom — in a montage of cycling, escalating anguish, beautifully cut by editor Sofia Subercaseaux — die before reaching their first birthday.
This inordinate accumulation of tragedy is what finally convinces Ann — much to her husband’s consternation — that lifelong celibacy is the only way to achieve true closeness to God, which becomes the core tenet of her own offshoot of Shaking Quakerism, which she, William (now Lewis Pullman) and her few followers determine can only thrive away from the dirt and debauchery of Manchester, and indeed the British Isles. Cue a transatlantic voyage to America, where on dry upstate land Shakerism as we recognize it today begins to take shape — quite literally, as Samuel Bader’s meticulous production design and William Rexer’s linen-textured lensing deftly begin to limn the movement’s signature aesthetic, breaking from the dim, russety visual clutter of the film’s previous chapters. Still, a stable, spreading presence doesn’t come without skeptical resistance from their fellow settlers.
Divided into chapters marked by exquisitely designed, archaically worded title cards — the film’s own subtitle, incidentally, is “The Woman Clothed by the Sun With the Moon Under Her Feet” — it’s a robust, often stirring cradle-to-grave saga with more narrative emphasis placed on communal discord and well-being than on individual yearnings and frustrations. That feels spiritually in line with Shaker doctrine, though it yields mixed rewards dramatically: Ann and Abraham’s suddenly sexless marriage merits more screen time and scrutiny, as does her poignant but intriguingly, ambiguously devoted relationship to William.
Seyfried, her extraordinary eyes never wider or more steeled with conviction, is quite dazzling as Ann the self-made icon, wielding a poised, peaceable but controlling authority on scene after scene while rarely raising her voice except in lilting song. But, perhaps appropriately, she never lets us past her buttoned-to-the-neck, mother-to-all-and-none veneer: We don’t know what Ann, in her darkest heart of hearts, truly wants from this life and the next. Maybe she doesn’t either.
It’s in those enthralling, borderline-absurd musical numbers that she attains whatever the Shakers call nirvana, and the film does too: a symbiosis between sound, word and image that genuinely, movingly captures humanity’s desperate reach for the divine. Rowlson-Hall’s ecstatic, thrusting dance direction may take its inspiration from the original Shaking Quaker moves, but it wittily comes to resemble a kind of deconstructed sexual intercourse — a pursuit of bliss, in whatever form, echoed by starkly repeated, incantatory lyrics about “hunger and thirst,” “building and growing,” “loving mother, loving her way.” “The Testament of Ann Lee” is rich in agnostic questioning and bemused human interest, but at such radiant peaks, Fastvold makes believers of us all.
