The Testament of Ann Lee

Strange, ravishing and rhapsodic, there aren’t many movies like Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, unless you can think of another historical folk musical about a nearly-vanished religious movement that turns its followers’ convulsive expressions of devotion into Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers. A cradle-to-grave portrait of Ann Lee, the founder of the Christian sect known as the Shakers, the film is, at turns, completely stunning and utterly baffling. At its most successful, though, it doesn’t just depict ecclesiastical fervor – it sweeps you up in it.

In that way, the movie is really a testament to the performance of Amanda Seyfried. As Lee, she fills her large, expressive eyes with a sense of unwavering belief — appropriate for a woman who came to see herself as the reincarnation of Christ himself. 

The movie is a testament to the performance of Amanda Seyfried

Informed by an impoverished childhood and staggering personal losses as an adult, the 18th century Mancunian preached a utopian vision of society based in broad egalitarianism and a strict adherence to celibacy. Naturally, that led to persecution at home from the ruling evangelical order, prompting her eventual escape, along with her latent-homosexual brother (Lewis Pullman), bewildered husband (Christopher Abbott) and small flock of disciples, to the alleged promised land of America. Illustrating her life in the tones of a Dutch oil painting, Fastvold treats Lee’s faith with sincerity and respect, and Seyfried repays her with a performance of such commitment it could sell God to Christopher Hitchens.

Of course, they didn’t call them the ‘shaking Quakers’ for nothing, and if the film sags in its stretches of straightforward biography, the musical sequences are where it comes alive. Composer Daniel Blumberg – who won an Oscar for scoring Fastvold and co-writer Brady Corbet’s previous collaboration, The Brutalist – adapts a series of Shaker hymns into stomp-clap praise songs, which choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall in turn transforms into flailing, spinning, chest-thumping displays of spiritual ecstasy. Something like a tent revival-meets-modern dance, they’re the movie’s main source of mysticism, and also comedy: see the scene involving actor David Cale and his possessed index finger.

As a movement that disavowed even procreative sex, Shakerism wasn’t built to last: only three adherents remain. As a monument to the enigma of faith, Fastvold’s film will hopefully prove more sustaining – God willing.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Feb 27.