The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) Review!!

Synopsis – Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, proclaimed as the female Christ by her followers. Depicts her establishment of a utopian society and the Shakers’ worship through song and dance, based on real events.

My Take – While I generally avoid films centered on religion, the buzz surrounding this one made me curious. After all, how compelling could a musical biopic about a woman who led a tiny branch of Christianity in the 1700s possibly be?

But in the hands of director Mona Fastvold (The World to Come), who co-wrote the film with her creative and romantic partner Brady Corbet, the driving force behind last year’s festival and awards-season darling The Brutalist, the result becomes a truly one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. Fueled by its music and performances, the film evolves into something far more audacious—and far more visceral—than its premise might suggest.

Acting as a heavily stylized historical account of the founding of the Christian sect known as the Shakers—formally the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—the film centers on Ann Lee, who rose to prominence after proclaiming herself the second coming of Christ. For her followers, worship offered a direct line to God through ecstatic folk music, breathy song, and frenzied, thrashing dance.

Sure, it’s a peculiar tale—one that occasionally meanders—but director Fastvold seems less concerned with cataloging every historical detail than with immersing us in the inner lives of her characters. Drawing from real Shaker hymns, songs, and movements, the film uses music and choreography to sweep us into the group’s fervent devotion. Every primal gasp, shout, and skyward fling of the arms conveys the ecstatic release they found in prayer. Niche it may be, but it’s a vision worth paying attention to—especially given how the titular role is embodied with total conviction by Amanda Seyfried.

Narrated by one of her most devoted followers, her second-in-command Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), the story unfolds across three chapters spanning the nearly fifty years of Ann Lee’s life. We first encounter her as a child growing up in Manchester, the second eldest in a large working-class family. Living in the looming shadow of the church and surrounded by the thunderous proclamations of fundamentalist street preachers, young Ann (played at different ages by Esmee Hewett and Millie-Rose Crossley)—quickly develops a troubled relationship with the world around her.

After condemning her father’s sexual relations with her mother, she earns his fury, and her youthful impertinence is punished with a brutal whipping across her hands. Years later, now a grown woman, Ann (Amanda Seyfried) searches for spiritual purpose and finds herself drawn to the Religious Society of Friends—better known as the Quakers. In particular, she becomes captivated by a small sect led by Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin), joining alongside her brother William (Lewis Pullman) and niece Nancy (Viola Prettejohn).

Their form of worship is ecstatic and physical: congregants sway, chant, and convulse as though overtaken by the Holy Spirit. It is here, too, that Ann meets her future husband Abraham Standerin (Christopher Abbott). Despite her lingering misgivings, she dutifully enters into marriage, and over the years gives birth to four children.

Tragically, in a devastating sequence of losses, all four die before reaching their first birthday. Convinced that God is punishing her for what she calls the “sins of the flesh,” Ann renounces sexual intercourse entirely. As she rises through the ranks of the sect—eventually becoming both priest and spiritual leader—her growing influence attracts increasing hostility from the outside world. Branded a public nuisance and briefly imprisoned, Ann responds with a hunger strike. After weeks of deprivation, she emerges claiming to have received a divine vision instructing her to cross the ocean and carry God’s message to the newly established American colonies.

The tricky line that film rides is its demonstration of admiration for an unorthodox religion that allowed women to serve in leadership roles, was accepting of members regardless of their race or past transgressions, and that seemingly lived the principles it espoused without hypocrisy or in pursuit of personal enrichment while also being clear-eyed that the faith was doomed to fail, in no small part because of the woman who evangelized it.

Here, director Fastvold shows little interest in adjudicating the truth of Lee’s divine revelations. She never attempts to discredit the claim itself, nor does she interrogate the broader nature of religious epiphany.

Instead, the film fixates on the humanistic elements of faith—the deep yearning among believers for some unmistakable sign of providence entering their lives. Ann’s complicated relationship with sex ultimately becomes the quicksand upon which the church is built. Her insistence that all followers embrace celibacy—an extension of her own personal neuroses—proves both foundational and self-defeating. Yet without ever belaboring the point, it becomes clear from the way director Fastvold stages the film’s many dance sequences that the Shakers are simply channeling those suppressed desires into a different, more socially acceptable form.

Working alongside choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall and composer Daniel Blumberg, she transforms the group’s ecstatic rituals into something visceral and immediate. Their vibrant celebrations of bodily contortion and prostration before their maker carry a palpable intensity. These displays of “shaking” become near-orgiastic set pieces of coordinated movement and elaborate choreography—bodies thrusting in rhythmic unison, believers hoisted aloft while repetitive yet undeniably catchy spirituals echo through the gathering.

At the center of it all stands Seyfried’s Ann, holding the frame with wild-eyed fervor. At times, the film fully embraces its identity as a musical—and a remarkable one at that. The most stirring sequences are those in which it surrenders entirely to the earnest pageantry of communal song and the fervor of dance.

If there is one major critique, it lies in the pacing—particularly in the latter half, where the story begins to drag. The narrative slows considerably as it focuses on the simmering tension between the Shakers and their neighbors, and the film occasionally struggles to maintain the momentum established earlier.

Nevertheless, the film excels at illustrating the fundamental dilemma faced by the movement: the difficulty of recruiting converts versus the natural growth that comes from raising children within a faith. That tension lends the ending a quiet melancholy once one realizes just how few Shakers remain in the world today. It ultimately becomes a fascinating study of a community that chose spiritual purity over biological survival—a concept that may feel alien to many, yet one that the filmmakers approach with striking respect.

Performance wise, undoubtedly, this is very much a role of a lifetime for Amanda Seyfried, and she proves absolutely magnificent in it. She lives and breathes the grace her character exudes, imbuing Ann with a quiet magnetism that feels genuinely inspiring. Crucially, Seyfried never reduces the role to that of a simple savior or saint. Instead, through her poetic physicality and that soft, wavering warble of a voice, she conveys the strain of a woman wrestling with deep, profound turmoil before arriving at a place of hard-won spiritual joy. It’s a performance that anchors the entire film; without Seyfried holding the center, many of the film’s slower passages might have proven far more difficult to endure.

In supporting roles, Christopher Abbott, Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie, Stacy Martin, Viola Prettejohn, Matthew Beard, and Tim Blake Nelson all deliver solid work, though their primary task is clear: to keep the spotlight firmly fixed on Amanda Seyfried. On the whole, ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ is a heavily stylized historical account that stands as a beautifully shot and expertly acted piece of cinema.