The Testament of Ann Lee

After co-writing The Brutalist alongside her husband, Brady Corbet, director Mona Fastvold sets her sights on another sweeping historical epic—this time focusing on the complexities of religion in “The Testament Of Ann Lee.” Here, she stages a somatic inquiry into how motherhood, religion, and ritual movement reshape identity, authority, and communal belonging. 

Amanda Seyfried’s Ann Lee converts reproductive loss and bodily betrayal into a prophetic vocation, transforming private suffering into public leadership that privileges spiritual kinship over biological lineage. Bodily failure and reproductive pain become theological fuel for celibacy and communal reordering, rather than sources of marginalization.

In the film’s sequences of sex and childbirth, the lighting is minimal and the editing disjointed, producing a cold, dejected atmosphere that emphasizes corporeal breakdown rather than intimacy. Quick cuts fragment time and feeling, forcing the viewer to experience rupture in the same jagged way Ann does. These moments of bodily betrayal become the raw material for her later theological stance.

By contrast, scenes inside Shaker meeting houses are suffused with warm light and longer takes, inviting sustained attention. Confessions unfold in extended shots that allow faces and gestures to register slowly; the camera lingers as members testify aloud. Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography moves confession directly into ritual dance, and those longer takes let the audience witness the unified transformation. Shame is spoken, then embodied, turning the shaking, stamping, and spiralling into a religious grammar. 

Wide angles and smooth camera movement guide us through these tableaux, while the sound design foregrounds breaths, footfalls, chest thumps, and the creaking of wooden floors. In scenes where bodies convulse together, the camera holds on the collective rhythm, framing the shaking as voluntary exposure—a deliberate offering of the self within the communal chorus.

The more subjective instances of religious experience are delivered in hypnotic, dizzying fashion. Ann’s visions, including her interpretation of Adam and Eve, unfold in strikingly gorgeous abstract sequences filmed with heightened visual intensity to separate them from everyday life. These visions directly inform a new set of community rules: celibacy, common property, and a reordering of kinship so that members are called “brothers” and “sisters” under Ann’s title of “Mother.” 

Elsewhere in the film, an apocalyptic eclipse causes worshippers of another religion to repent in tears while heavy guitar strings underscore the foreboding image of the sun clothing the moon, a sequence that contrasts suppression with public repentance.

The musical number “Hunger & Thirst” functions as a climactic example of collective possession. Seyfried’s performance begins with sheepish, restrained movement before evolving into synchronized ecstasy, the music and choreography converging to make revelation visible and audible. Fastvold constructs a masterful cinematic language of transmutation within these sequences, presenting vivid imagery that evokes feelings akin to those in the religions being portrayed. That we can almost feel these moments of revelation makes their coding into communal laws understandable for the audience.

Fastvold refuses sentimental or reductive portrayals of motherhood. Loss and bodily betrayal become the crucible of Ann’s authority, reframing reproductive suffering from an innate transgression into a source of prophetic clarity. Celibacy becomes a deliberate theological response that reorganizes desire into sanctioned forms of spiritual love, while Ann’s adoption of the title “Mother” signals a shift from private biological identity to public, ritualized leadership.

The Shaker movement in the film functions simultaneously as liberation and discipline. Ann’s visions justify abstention and gender parity, yet ritualism also governs bodies and channels desire into sanctioned outlets. Fastvold stages this tension without resolving it: ecstatic worship heals and demands conformity; confession reduces isolation but also produces social regulation; and the community continually negotiates the porous boundary between spiritual love and erotic longing.

Form and content are deeply intertwined so that the audience’s perception aligns with the worshipper's experience. Long takes, choreographed camera moves, and tactile sound design make limbs and floors into instruments of testimony. Seyfried anchors the film’s moral complexity by translating inner rupture into public authority. Her physical command in “Hunger & Thirst” turns private pain into collective revelation, inviting the viewer to witness rather than to judge.

Ultimately, “The Testament Of Ann Lee” explores the beauty of transformation, mapping a complex terrain in which devotion can both release and control, exaltation can both heal and demand, and embodied practices can remake shame into testimony without erasing ethical ambiguity. Underpinning all of this is Fastvold’s insistence that freedom of expression is most radical when it is in service of something. In the Shaker movement of this film, grief and desire are translated into a societal movement that heals and contests the limits imposed by doctrine and biology. Much like Mother Ann herself, it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

9.5/10