‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ Review: Amanda Seyfried is Mother (Ann) in Mona Fastvold’s Miraculous Musical Drama [A] Venice

Religious dramas are not really my cup of tea, to use a British expression. I’m a big fan of Ingmar Bergman, but I’m not really fond of The Seventh Seal or The Virgin Spring. I adore Martin Scorsese, but Kundun, The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence are far from my favorites in his filmography. Maybe it’s because I’m an atheist, or maybe I just don’t get them – it can simply be a limit of mine. Sometimes you just don’t vibe with a genre, or subgenre in this case. So why was I floored by Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee?

The Testament of Ann Lee, premiering in Competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, is a musical, but it’s not really a musical. It’s a religious biopic, but it’s not really a religious biopic. What is it? I don’t really know. Does every movie need a label, a classification? This one certainly doesn’t. I feel it’s, by far and most, a human story that involves music and religion. The beauty of the story of Ann Lee is that goes beyond categories and genres, it is so powerful that it becomes all-encompassing.

Who was Ann Lee? The film’s most traditional aspect is its three-act structure: it starts with her childhood and adulthood in Manchester, England in the first half of the 18^th century, it moves on to the journey to New York state in the US, and ultimately the time of her death. This is pretty much all can be defined as conventional in Mona Fastvold’s script. The story of Ann Lee is told after her death by her followers, mostly by one of her sisters, played by the luminous Thomasin McKenzie. Ann Lee was the daughter of a smith in Manchester: endowed of a fighting and defying spirit, Ann Lee would take care of her siblings, especially her brother William, and would ultimately clash with her harsh father. Unhappy and angry at the sexual act that she sees her father perform on her mother; she leaves the house and starts working at the local hospital. During this time, she discovers a religious group led by the Wardleys, and she’s particularly struck by the dance that they perform during their worship: as taken by mystic ecstasy, people start to move and sing and literally shake their bodies – hence the name Shakers adopted by the group. This is also where she meets her eventual husband Abraham: they fall in love but they’re also struck by tragedy, as all their four children die within their first year, one of them stillborn. Now at the lead of her own group as the result of visions that give her the name of Mother Ann, seen as the Second Coming of the Christ, she imposes her own only and singular dogma: for one to be part of the group, they need to abstain from fornication, the one single act that will spoil a human soul rotten and prevent it from reaching the Kingdom of God. The dancing and singing of the Shakers, as well as the presence of a female leader, ultimately pushes the group to migrate to the New World, in search of religious freedom. There, Mother Ann and her Shakers attempt to build a community, hoping that trouble won’t find them again.

Shot on 70mm, away from the spotlight and in secret in Hungary with the same team that made The Brutalist, directed by Mona Fastvold’s life partner and co-writer Brady Corbet, The Testament of Ann Lee is an absolute jewel of a film. Epic in scale and intimate in its storytelling, it tells a story from almost 200 years ago that feels fresh and contemporary. What other religious story involves a group led by a woman that advocates equality and rights for everyone when Puritanism was still very much alive? This particular aspect has definitely captured Fastvold’s attention: when the Shakers arrive in New York City and they see a group of black people being sold at an auction, their first reaction is of indignation; at the hint of a possibly latent-but-not-really homosexuality of her brother William, the film doesn’t flinch for a second. The Shakers embrace a certain sense of community that feels very out of time and very modern. They invite new followers by not predicting disgrace and tragedy in order to access Heaven but by requiring hard work, they despise war and violence – which can put them in trouble in war-ridden America – and they are open and gentle with people.

The film’s main quality, if one is ready to open its mind to it, is the absence of any sort of compromise. It is a very serious story that is able to embrace the campy and the silly – for example, a Monty Python-style sequence where a man is guided by its index finger to the location where to form the Shakers’ American community. It is a story of touching and liberating acceptance: a highlight sequence of a mother confessing to thinking of killing her child to enjoy one single moment of quiet and silence is filmed so naturally that it brough a tear to my eye. How many women have, even just for a second, shared that thought? How many women have condemned themselves for that thought? And yet, in Ann Lee’s view, that’s human. Sin does not deserve punishing but understanding. The whole film comes from that place of deep understanding for humanity.

Mona Fastvold’s seamless direction gives the movie its extra power. The film is an epic and a character study, as epic are the extraordinary musical sequences. Scored by the great Daniel Blumberg (The Brutalist) and intricately choregraphed by Celia Rowlson-Hall, the dances of the Shakers become a mixture of ecstasy and liberation, their worship becomes vivid, physical and magnetically intense. Despite the obvious artistic licenses that a director takes while making a film, one can sense that the research on Ann Lee and the Shakers was meticulous. The cinematography is pictorially eloquent, from Vermeer’s depiction of light to the chiaroscuro homages to Rembrandt and Caravaggio, while the editing gives rhythm and pace to the story: one extraordinary sequence in particular, set on the ship that is transporting the Shakers to America, is alternatively cut during three different moments of the day, making it dynamic, compelling and visually stunning.

Yet, at the end of it all, the film wouldn’t have the same impact if it wasn’t anchored by the extraordinary performance given by Amanda Seyfried. Angelic and fierce at once, Seyfried gives the performance of a lifetime, ferocious and visceral and vulnerable, making Ann Lee not just a historical figure from the past, but making her alive again. Seyfried’s Ann Lee exists before our own eyes, always defiant and unwavering. She shares the stage with the great Lewis Pullman, perfect as the tender, gentle brother William, as well as Christopher Abbott, the sturdy and frustrated husband Abraham: they’re all part of an ensemble cast that works.

The Testament of Ann Lee is a cathartic, ecstatic and liberating piece of extraordinary cinema that I won’t easily forget.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival where The Testament of Ann Lee had its world premiere. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.