The Testament Of Ann Lee Review | Amanda Seyfried Gives Soul And Light To This Spiritual Epic

Opening the Red Lorry Film Festival at Mumbai, The Testament of Ann Lee might be the most peculiar musical biopic you would have watched in a while. By all accounts, Mona Fastvold’s film is a work of great, uncanny curiosity while also being jarringly narrow. In divining visions of its titular female preacher, there’s the emergence of a daring break from tradition, a spiritual pursuit that tends to feed a male frontrunner. Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), the leader of the 18th century Shaker religious sect, is transgression embodied within gentleness.

A voiceover peppers in a linear telling of Ann’s life. Raised in the shadow of a Manchester church, she yearns for religious conviction. Even as a child, she witnesses heavenly visions instead of trifling toys. There’s a harrowing, gaslighting-heavy marriage she endures before putting her foot down. Her equation with her body—what repels and attracts—shift in the wake of the relationship. An extended montage lays bare the misery that breaks her until she finds new light in wholly abdicating fornication. Fastvold scurries through Ann’s devotion to the Shaker community’s ethos. This group derives spiritual upliftment from within, not locating it elsewhere in some illusory plane. Vigorous dance becomes its conduit. The Testament of Ann Lee is most dazzling in such exploding dance-led ecstasy. In every thrusting movement, we sense the community’s purging of grief, their hope of transcending mundane rejection. Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall lugs the film through recurring tedium—a mission’s uninvolving progression.

Expanding on Shaker tenets, Ann bases her faith on a complete repudiation of the carnal. There’s the trauma of marital rape, the loss of four children, that has left her sapped. The procreative itself is shunned in her book, which naturally doesn’t sit well with the patriarchal coercion of women to rear children. Ann is aware how this tenet will always court popular disfavour and risk losing possible subscribers.

But Ann’s tremendous clear-sightedness, her unerring resolve in her philosophies, doesn’t budge or wince at repeated threats. A female preacher is beyond the conservative imagination of anyone she meets. Fastvold traces each ramming opposition as only strengthening Ann’s mission. Her ambition remains undiluted. She has a tenacity that’s unshakeable, a moral force that’s undeterrable. She has no delusions of the road being tricky and thorny. She knows it’ll take time, steady persuasion and examples of service to attract new followers. But the slandering is constant. Her entire group is forced to disperse time and again. There are attacks, accusations, incarceration and mudslinging, but Anne stays nobler and resists answering with similar antagonism.

Seyfried is marvellous, especially as a figure caught between enigma, scepticism and immense gravitational pull. The screenplay, which Fastvold co-wrote with Brady Corbet, deliberately withholds, creating a spare inward recess inviting meaning, assumption and interpretation. Seyfried renders Ann’s complex mystery through exteriorised gestures and sprawling choreography that freely embraces all. We aren’t wholly lent access to her own conflicted thoughts, viewing her instead within how she expresses to and exhorts her cult. It’s this framework governing her projection. We infer the essence of her thought by virtue of an intensely physical realm that otherwise ironically omits any gratification.

But Fastvold’s gaze tends to be cold and distant. She orchestrates grand, surging sweeps of choreography that’s breathless and frenzied. These are severed from a persuasive or cohesive emotional trajectory. It’s a delicate balance between ambiguity and clarity which the film doesn’t always ace. A film like this ought to situate its music with a view to interrogate and cull through the terrain of the times. Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg’s compositions, adapting Shaker hymns, reach rapturous heights. There’s pain, exultation and an intensely grasping bid for sublimity. Ann isn’t consecrating a church for some pagan agenda, which is what the suspicion passes around as. Her singular piety stems from her childhood, a calling for benevolence. Fastvold underlines how Ann is driven entirely by altruistic interests. But there’s marked erasure of other complicated, damning, awkward interactions of Ann with religion and personal agency.

Seyfried’s performance, impassioned and searching, infuses the film with deeper pathos, rousing glory rather than what the script suggests in vague, rushed strokes. Ann journeys to America for spreading the Shaker gospel. The price this comes at is extreme, but Seyfried’s eyes hint at pioneering vision, which evades all. The Testament of Ann Lee fumbles in transmitting how Ann’s community widens, her deep loneliness of staunchly pushing for something others shirk.

The Testament of Ann Lee screened at the Red Lorry Film Festival (13-15 March, 2026).