Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet have been life partners since 2012, and creative partners for much of that time as well. But it’s only been within the last 18 months that they’ve taken the cinematic landscape by storm with what might now be a recognisable brand: the consideration of American history through an epic scope and the lens of its European immigrants, and shot on 35 mm film stock. Are two movies, one of which just came out, enough to declare a trend? You be the judge.
The one that just came out is The Testament of Ann Lee, where Fastvold is the director and co-writer with Corbet, whereas Corbet served as director and co-writer with Fastvold on 2024’s Oscar-winning The Brutalist. The former more firmly established the proposed brand in the form of the Statue of Liberty appearing upside down in its opening scene, introducing us to a perspective that was literally askew. The Testament of Ann Lee takes a lot longer to get to the United States, at least a third of its running time, but it seems equally to be a commentary on the nascent U.S. – quite nascent in Revolutionary War times – as the place where Ann Lee’s Shakers could get some sort of foothold in a newly established world still finding its identity.
If only Testament reached as fascinating conclusions about that identity as The Brutalist. A film that contains as much sex and God as you could hope for, and is also a musical, certainly seems like it should end up in a more definitive place thematically than it does. And even at a full hour shorter than The Brutalist, it wears out its welcome more quickly, perhaps because it uses the Shakers not as a metaphor for something else, but as an endpoint unto themselves. Once the initial novelty wears off, we’re left with just a lot of shaking.
Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) was born in Manchester in 1736, where she developed an early devotion to God and disdain for sexual congress. When, as a girl, she witnesses her father mounting her mother, she accuses him of wickedness – an accusation that carries a penalty of a switch across the knuckles. As she ages, though, she has a more compelling reason to question the pleasures of the flesh. Her relations with her husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott) lead to the loss of four infants before their first birthdays, and in a montage you won’t soon forget, we see Ann going through a ritual of bloody births, all of which are headed for tragedy before the year is out.
Her association with a group of “shaking Quakers” leads to a period of imprisonment, during which she has a vision of herself as the female Messiah – a vision that had been foretold in the group’s meetings. Followers, including her brother William (Lewis Pullman), are quick to endorse Ann’s vision, though Abraham might not be so happy about her conclusion about the key to a pious life. Ann believes that only through celibacy can the faithful commune with God, and she also believes that the “new England” is the place where she and her followers will have the religious freedom they do not have in the old one.
We don’t see a lot of musicals set in the 18th century – they haven’t made the movie version of Hamilton yet – so The Testament of Ann Lee may strike viewers as quite the disconnect. The songs themselves, composed by Daniel Blumberg, don’t have an anachronistic quality to them, as Blumberg used Shaker hymns as inspiration for what he would write. And because the Shaker denomination of Christianity involves a very freestyle form of spiritual expression, complete with agonised howling and frenetic hand movements, song and dance numbers actually come to feel like a logical outgrowth of the material. Some mesmerise us, especially those with a machine-like sense of coordination, as William Rexer’s camera spins around them and takes in all the detail.
The trouble is that the songs don’t reflect a progression of Ann Lee’s spiritual journey, and that’s because the narrative is not really doing that. Her religious notions are a stationary element in this film full of motion. Films that focus intensely on religion are usually using it as a way to investigate the characters, or perhaps the period of history. Those are the things that interest religiously disinclined viewers – in other words, most viewers of a film like this. And that’s surely what Fastvold and Corbet mean to do here.
But the reason The Testament of Ann Lee starts to feel repetitive – even as it exposes the characters to new shocks and vicissitudes in their literal, physical journey – is that this movie seems accidentally to be about Shakerism. The Brutalist was not about brutalist architecture, it was about a handful of very specifically drawn characters and the engrossing, sometimes outlandish, experiences they had.
This film doesn’t have the same sense of its characters. Ann is a bit of cipher beyond her basic religious convictions, and the character we spend the most time with other than Ann – her brother, William – is given a single scene languishing in bed with a male lover, before that lover, and this whole aspect of his character, is vanquished from the story entirely. This lack of depth has the inadvertent impact of making the Shakers themselves seem one-dimensional, which is surely not what Fastvold intended.
You only make these complaints about a film like The Testament of Ann Lee because you like so much of what it’s doing and you just ache for that certain something that might have made it truly transcendent. There are bold surface gestures aplenty in this film, from Seyfried’s taxing performance, to the staging of the numbers, to the chapter headings that look like period appropriate engravings, to the very notion to make a movie like this in the first place. It’s so close to something truly superlative, that you’re inclined to focus on what stopped it from getting there.
Even if this movie is rather too much about Shakerism, what an interesting thing for a film to be about. The first time you hear an old woman wailing at the confession of a sin, and a room full of congenial souls begin lurching and twirling and howling in sympathy, you remark to yourself just how very cinematic the whole thing was. And word is they made really good furniture, too.
The Testament of Ann Lee is currently playing in cinemas.