Hot on the heels of “The Brutalist,” Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet have returned with one other sweeping historic epic a couple of European iconoclast who involves America so as to construct a brand new sort of church. Even extra excitingly, “The Testament of Ann Lee” — a speculative, feverish, and altogether rapturous biopic concerning the Mancunian preacher who based the Shakers and believed herself to be the feminine incarnation of Christ on Earth — addresses essentially the most obvious drawback with final 12 months’s story concerning the fictional architect László Tóth: It wasn’t a musical.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” isn’t precisely a musical both, to be truthful. Sure, its characters are liable to singing and dancing when the spirit grabs them (a divinely heightened play on the “Quaking Shakers’” full-body method to spiritual devotion), however the film’s euphoric “movements” cleave so much nearer to prayers than to conventional numbers. Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg transfigures a dozen conventional hymns into propulsive and electrifying choral jams that thrum with biblical fervor, whereas “Aftersun” choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall rearranges the figures of Ann Lee’s close-knit congregation till they kind a human alter to the heaven their “mother” is hoping to create with them right here on Earth.
As in a extra easy musical, the Shakers are utilizing music and dance to precise a spread of emotions that plainspoken phrases couldn’t hope to convey. But the exultation of those actions, and of the remainder of Fastvold’s movie past them — which, like “The Brutalist,” she co-wrote with life companion Corbet — has a lot much less to do with any lyrical content material than it does with the elation of collective concord. With the orgiastic glory of making a shared objective between individuals, and the evangelical labor of changing that objective into motion.
Fastvold is probably not a Shaker herself, which shouldn’t come as a lot of a shock contemplating that there are precisely three of them remaining ultimately rely (and solely then as a result of a brand new adherent joined the opposite two only a few weeks in the past), however “The Testament of Ann Lee” is likely one of the most persistently ecstatic motion pictures I’ve ever seen exactly as a result of it doesn’t get hung up on the gospel fact. This is a movie outlined by a profound respect for its namesake’s religion, but it surely’s additionally a movie pushed by an much more profound appreciation for the extra secular beliefs that she leveraged her religion to pursue; it’s outstanding as a testomony of Ann Lee, and much more in order a testomony to her quasi-artistic potential to marshal individuals collectively within the service of making a greater world.
In a way, “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a celebration of — after which in its much less rhapsodic second half, a plea for — the circumstances required to make a film like “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Here is one other mad pursuit with shallow pockets and grand ambitions (which appears like a mega-budgeted studio mission, because of manufacturing designer Sam Bader). It’s one other utopian prayer led by a girl in a enterprise dominated by males, a girl who, in Fastvold’s case, needed to harness the energies of a crew a lot bigger than Ann Lee’s preliminary congregation so as to fulfill her imaginative and prescient. Like “The Brutalist” earlier than it (to say nothing of Fastvold’s heart-wrenchingly nice “The World to Come” earlier than that), the movie doubles as a workable various for a way movies may be made. Just as Ann Lee’s upbeat message appealed to a Christian inhabitants that had grown bored with being promised salvation by means of struggling, Fastvold and Corbet’s mannequin provides a extra actionable response to an trade sick of Hollywood doomsayers.
Then once more, it takes so much various low-cost Hungarian finances hacks to conjure the sort of spell that Fastvold does right here. For starters, there’s just one Amanda Seyfried, whose moonstone eyes had been made to convey spiritual bliss. The “First Reformed” actress offers the perfect efficiency of her profession as “The Woman Clothed by the Sun,” her Ann Lee convincingly craving for objective even earlier than she begins to create one for herself.
Set within the grey and unforgiving Manchester of 1736, the primary part of this film is the story of a wayward soul looking for a concord between God (who she loves) and the church (which doesn’t love her again). She finds a measure of creature consolation within the arms of her smitten however extreme husband Abraham (a terrific Christopher Abbott, masterfully navigating actual affection and 18th century male entitlement), who ravishes Ann with a fetishistic consideration that his bride isn’t positive learn how to obtain. For one factor, she’s younger and uneducated. For one other, even worldly sinners like us would most likely be confused if our companions wished to smack our naked asses with a brush whereas studying from the Book of Revelations.
But Ann’s sexual ambivalence runs far deeper than old-timey kink. She first grew to become skeptical of the topic as a little bit lady, when she was compelled to observe her father grunt on prime of her mom only a few toes away, and that skepticism started to calcify right into a deeper distrust when her mom died through the supply of her eighth little one. For a girl like Ann, marital intercourse is an important a part of affirming her Christian responsibility, however the sense of self-becoming that it gives is rhymed by the autonomy that “belonging” to her husband strips away from her in return.
These conflicted emotions come to a head within the movie’s most astonishing sequence, a whirlstorm of intercourse, labor, dance, anguish, music, demise, and mourning by which Ann delivers 4 kids, none of whom survive past infancy regardless of her determined makes an attempt to feed them with life. The choreography right here is breathtakingly evocative; heightened however not unreal, trendy however true to the spirit of the Georgian period, as suspended between modes as Ann is between this world and the following. Needless to say, the expertise has a soul-scarring impact on Ann, who turns into satisfied that her terrible ordeal is punishment for her sins of the flesh. “Our unbearable tragedies are God’s judgment upon me,” she concludes earlier than declaring that procreation is sacrilege and main the primary Shakers in three days of spasmodic worship so intense that Sister Mary (Thomasin McKenzie) — Ann’s most devoted acolyte and this film’s narrator — insists that folks thought she was going to die.
Carefully balanced between agony and ecstasy earlier than it progressively begins to claw its manner nearer towards the latter, Seyfried’s possessed efficiency has no hassle promoting us on the credibility of these fears. She’s a research in unbridled expiation, her physique open and tilting upwards to the sky as if she had been receiving instruction from the heavens, her each rhythmic breath a sort of transubstantiation.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” would by no means maintain collectively if not for the unwavering conviction that Seyfried affords its title character. Since a movie made for Shakers would solely stand to gross about $40 at most, Fastvold understands that the majority viewers received’t share Ann’s self-beliefs; what’s extra vital is that we consider that Ann does. We might come to a extra psychological rationale for her prophetic awakening, which is clearly borne from the ache of her losses, however we’re additionally disabused of any cynicism relating to the sincerity of her religion (even when, uh, we’d query the long-term end result of a faith that forbids its followers to start out households and fortify their ranks).
The individuals closest to Ann, particularly her younger brother William (a terrific Lewis Pullman, sturdy and receptive to the thought of a sibling Christ 2.0), don’t have any hassle accepting hers as the one fact, and so the film’s spectacular-looking second act takes to the seas as Mother Ann and her two dozen adherents set sail for the New World, whose religion was nonetheless unformed. The boat set is the place William Rexer’s 35mm cinematography actually begins to shine, because the Caravaggio-like interiors of the primary act distinction in opposition to the violent gray-blue seas that threaten to capsize the ship and drown Ann’s upstart faith in a single fell swoop. The journey is a dangerous one between two mutually antagonized lands, however the Shakers’ shared objective proves to be their salvation, and sees them safely to Manhattan.
It’s there, on the shores of pre-Revolutionary America, that “The Testament of Ann Lee” most neatly dovetails with “The Brutalist,” as Fastvold begins to exalt within the promise of a rustic nonetheless ready to be born. America’s self-invention runs parallel to Ann’s, and rhymes with it in all of its aspiration and strife. If (like “The Brutalist”), the second half of this movie is a a lot slower, darker, and fewer dynamic meditation on the occasions of the primary, it’s additionally the place Fastvold and Corbet’s script begins to lament how America has at all times been so desirous to snuff out the idealist spark that’s — or was — able to making it such a beacon of hope for the remainder of the world.
Through the lens of the nascent Shaker neighborhood that Ann establishes close to Albany (and the place she instructs her followers to start making the furnishings they’re nonetheless remembered for at the moment), we see this nation as a spot constructed on the energy of cooperation, in addition to a spot weak to the identical provincial pondering from which it hoped to declare independence. The Shakers thrive by buying and selling with the native indigenous inhabitants, and from providing new concepts to annoyed white colonialists who’d been conditioned for despair (embodied right here by Tim Blake Nelson). They additionally endure by the hands of brutish mobs who reject their presence on precept, oblivious to the irony of so violently betraying the identical rights they’ve simply fought a battle to ascertain. A story as outdated as time.
Grace is a troublesome factor to protect, and “The Testament of Ann Lee” turns into a much less viscerally singular expertise because it transitions from sanctifying that grace to grieving it. The music grows much less frequent, we start to see Daniel Blumberg onscreen (a hanging determine!) as a lot as we hear from him off it, and the readability of Ann’s imaginative and prescient is clouded by the brutishness that surrounds it. As in most tales, the inevitable isn’t as compelling because the miraculous, and there’s an exasperation — nevertheless essential and/or deliberate — in watching the final act of Fastvold’s movie deprive us of the contagious ecstasy that carried a lot of the primary two, as if a film so guided by voices has all of the sudden misplaced its tongue.
Of course, Ann can be fast to remind us that there’s a spot for the whole lot, and the whole lot as a substitute. The final brilliance of Fastvold’s film, which stays with out query for all of its peaks and valleys, is that it has the braveness to reimagine the essence of belonging itself; to see it not as one thing we discover, however slightly as one thing that we create collectively.
Grade: A-
“The Testament of Ann Lee” premiered on the 2025 Venice Film Festival. It is at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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