The Testament of Ann Lee – a gorgeous celebration of transcendence through joy and religious experience
Mona Fastvold’s film about Ann Lee – the founder of the Shaker religious movement – is raw, intense and deeply physical. If you were to consult the leading critics of Christianity in film they would probably tell you that the best films in this genre are not like The Testament of Ann Lee at all.
These thinkers save their highest praise for films that are aesthetically minimal and grounded in reality, often using documentary filming techniques.
Tonally, these films are quiet and stripped back. They present a vision of faith that leans into quiet devotion and sufferance rather than the wild abandon of religious ecstasy. Think, for example, of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963), Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthasar(1966) or, in more recent years, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017).
The Testament of Ann Lee cuts through such male-dominated visions of religious experience. It offers a spectacle of transcendence, which is achieved not through restraint, but through a kind of carnal maximalism.
Shot by cinematographer William Rexer on 35mm, this is a richly textured, painterly film. At the centre of it is a performance of extreme physicality by Amanda Seyfried, best known to many viewers as the lovelorn gamine of Phyllida Lloyd’s 2008 Mamma Mia!
The Testament of Ann Lee is a very different sort of musical to Lloyd’s film, or indeed Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables (2012), in which Seyfried starred as Cosette. And Ann Lee is a very different type of heroine from those Seyfried has played before.
We first meet Ann as a young girl in 1770s Manchester, where she is an unwilling witness to her parents’ nightly conjugal rites. This embeds a deep-seated anxiety around sex that manifests as a series of baroque visions of Eden – a girthy snake insinuating its way across the screen and through Ann’s dreams.
Marriage to handsome blacksmith Abraham Standerin (Christopher Abbott), with his predilection for BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism) and blowjobs, exacerbates her unease. Four gruelling, bloody births and four gutting losses of children before any has reached the age of one, tips her into celibacy.
She renounces the sins of the flesh entirely, and somewhat paradoxically (considering how humans are made) pronounces total abstinence as humanity’s only route to salvation. Her brother William (Lewis Pullman) is quick to follow her lead, giving up his male lover and following her to east coast America, where “Mother Ann” will found an entire community of like-minded souls, but lose her husband in the process.
With all this grief and death and self-denial, one might expect Fastvold’s film to tend towards bleakness. But relief comes in the form of the film’s musical numbers.
As a young woman, Lee is introduced to Jane and James Wardley (Stacy Martin and Scott Handy), “Shaking Quakers” who preach that Jesus’s second coming will be a woman and embrace impromptu song and dance as part of worship. The film’s ostensibly spontaneous moments of wild abandon are rearrangements of traditional Shaker hymns by composer Daniel Blumberg, who previously worked on The Brutalist (co-written by Fastvold and director husband Brady Corbett, who also has a writing a credit here). These songs are sung by Seyfried and British avant-garde jazz and free-improvising vocalist Phil Minton’s Feral Choir, with a rough, nonprofessional vigour.
Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall took inspiration from historical illustrations of Shaker dances, the contemporary rave scene and the sect’s famed craftmanship in architecture, woodworking and joinery. These facets came together in a style of movement that is “very rounded and defined … nothing jagged or anything sharp”.
The dances are trancelike, ecstatic, almost orgiastic, as if all the sexual energies of Lee and her fellow Shakers has been turned towards the heavens. At moments I was reminded of Paul Verhoeven’s lusty lesbian melodrama Benedetta (2021), in which Virginie Efira’s novice nun carves a homemade dildo from a statuette of the virgin Mary.
Indeed, there is a gentle strain of queerness that runs through Lee’s most tender and enduring relationship, with close friend Mary Partington (Thomasin MacKenzie). Partington is the film’s narrator and the closest thing to an audience proxy – the Nick Carraway to Lee’s Jay Gatsby. Her voiceover is taken in part from the real testament published after Lee’s death by her fellow Shakers.
Framing Lee’s story with this loving testimony to her enduring impact redoubles the film’s feminist bent. Yes, Lee suffers – terribly so. (Among other things, Fastvold’s film is, like The Brutalist, a critique of modern America; the spectres of racism, xenophobia and misogyny skitter around its edges.)
But what we bear witness to, along with Mary, is far from a depressing catalogue of miseries. Rather, The Testament of Ann Lee is a gorgeous, muscular celebration of transcendence through joy, of female solidarity and leadership, and of the power of film to make, rather than veil, religious experience spectacular.
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Catherine Wheatley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.