Sizzling 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 as a way to construct a brand new form of church. Much more excitingly, “The Testomony 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 Testomony of Ann Lee” isn’t precisely a musical both, to be truthful. Certain, its characters are vulnerable to singing and dancing when the spirit grabs them (a divinely heightened play on the “Quaking Shakers’” full-body strategy to spiritual devotion), however the movie’s euphoric “actions” cleave quite a bit 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-Corridor rearranges the figures of Ann Lee’s close-knit congregation till they type a human alter to the heaven their “mom” is hoping to create with them right here on Earth.
As in a extra simple musical, the Shakers are utilizing tune and dance to precise a variety of emotions that plainspoken phrases couldn’t hope to convey. However 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 goal between individuals, and the evangelical labor of changing that goal into motion.
Fastvold will not be a Shaker herself, which shouldn’t come as a lot of a shock contemplating that there are precisely three of them remaining ultimately depend (and solely then as a result of a brand new adherent joined the opposite two just some weeks in the past), however “The Testomony of Ann Lee” is likely one of the most persistently ecstatic films I’ve ever seen exactly as a result of it doesn’t get hung up on the gospel reality. It is a movie outlined by a profound respect for its namesake’s religion, however it’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 exceptional as a testomony of Ann Lee, and much more in order a testomony to her quasi-artistic capability to marshal individuals collectively within the service of making a greater world.
In a way, “The Testomony 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 Testomony of Ann Lee.” Right here is one other mad pursuit with shallow pockets and grand ambitions (which appears like a mega-budgeted studio challenge due to manufacturing designer Sam Bader). It’s one other utopian prayer led by a lady in a enterprise dominated by males, a lady who, in Fastvold’s case, needed to harness the energies of a crew a lot bigger than Ann Lee’s preliminary congregation as a way 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 the way movies is likely to be made. Simply as Ann Lee’s upbeat message appealed to a Christian inhabitants that had grown uninterested in being promised salvation via struggling, Fastvold and Corbet’s mannequin affords a extra actionable response to an trade sick of Hollywood doomsayers.
Then once more, it takes quite a bit quite a lot of low-cost Hungarian finances hacks to conjure the form of spell that Fastvold does right here. For starters, there’s just one Amanda Seyfried, whose moonstone eyes have been made to convey non secular bliss. The “First Reformed” actress offers one of the best efficiency of her profession as “The Lady Clothed by the Solar,” her Ann Lee convincingly craving for goal 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 certain tips on how to obtain. For one factor, she’s younger and uneducated. For one more, 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 E book of Revelations.
However Ann’s sexual ambivalence runs far deeper than old-timey kink. She first turned skeptical of the topic as a bit lady, when she was pressured to look at her father grunt on high of her mom just some toes away, and that skepticism started to calcify right into a deeper distrust when her mom died through the supply of her eighth youngster. For a girl like Ann, marital intercourse is an important a part of affirming her Christian obligation, 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, tune, demise, and mourning wherein 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 subsequent. For sure, 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 insufferable 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.
Fastidiously balanced between agony and ecstasy earlier than it regularly begins to claw its approach 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 have been receiving instruction from the heavens, her each rhythmic breath a form of transubstantiation.
“The Testomony 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 gained’t share Ann’s self-beliefs; what’s extra essential is that we imagine 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 concerning the sincerity of her religion (even when, uh, we would query the long-term end result of a faith that forbids its followers to begin households and fortify their ranks).
The individuals closest to Ann, particularly her younger brother William (a terrific Louis Pullman, sturdy and receptive to the concept of a sibling Christ 2.0), don’t have any hassle accepting hers as the one reality, and so the film’s spectacular-looking second act takes to the seas as Mom 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 towards 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 goal proves to be their salvation, and sees them safely to Manhattan.
It’s there, on the shores of pre-Revolutionary America, that “The Testomony 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.
Via 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 in the present day), we see this nation as a spot constructed on the power of cooperation, in addition to a spot weak to the identical provincial considering 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 pissed off white colonialists who’d been conditioned for despair (embodied right here by Tim Blake Nelson). In addition they undergo 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 warfare to determine. A story as outdated as time.
Grace is a troublesome factor to protect, and “The Testomony 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 placing 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 — nonetheless crucial 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 instantly misplaced its tongue.
In fact, Ann can be fast to remind us that there’s a spot for every thing, and every thing instead. The last word 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 relatively as one thing that we create collectively.
Grade: A-
“The Testomony of Ann Lee” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Pageant. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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