The Testament of Ann Lee

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE   ***

Mona Fastvold

2025

IDEA:  In the 18th century, Ann Lee begins the Shaker religious movement in England and journeys across the Atlantic to grow her community in America.

BLURB:  As a genre for the exuberant externalization of feeling, the musical is perfectly suited to the subject of ecstatic religious worship. The Testament of Ann Lee is not a traditional musical, but it wholly embraces the roles of singing and dancing as extra-verbal, extra-rational, and transcendent expressions of human experience. Here, that expression is tied to a religious sect primarily characterized by the musicality and somatic energy suggested by its name. The film’s Shakers writhe, stomp, prance, and circle each other in rapt communion, Daniel Blumberg’s sonorous hymnal song-score flowing through them like volts of electricity connecting heaven and earth. In its most potent moments, when Fastvold and Corbet cede the sometimes stodgy narrative to the primal joy of bodily movement, The Testament of Ann Lee captures the euphoria — phenomenological or spiritual — of giving oneself over to a sensation of collective reverence. And in this, the film locates a core irony: that Ann Lee started such a profoundly corporeal movement as a repudiation of sex and earthly desires. She is a mother who refuses the biological mandates of the role, and as such, Fastvold and Corbet render her a kind of queer feminist figure, defined not merely by an opposition to patriarchy but procreation and domesticity. Amanda Seyfried is so passionately, uninhibitedly keyed into her portrayal that she helps mitigate the feeling that this all seems pretty idealized, biographical nuances softened by admiration for Lee’s iconoclasm and tenacity. Maybe it’s worth valuing such an earnest celebration of faith, and one that doesn’t forget its ineluctable basis in a human body at once mortal and malleable.