Henry O'Brien
Fresh off the heels of co-writing the Academy Award-winning film, The Brutalist, with husband Brady Corbet, director Mona Fastvold comes right back with a sprawling epic of her own. Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular leader of the Shaker movement, shares much in common with the 3 and a half hour awards darling: both films are immigrant stories split up into chapters and depict the United States as a land of false promises. Additionally, they both can reasonably read as a meditation on creating a work of art and the struggles that come with it (The Brutalist is far more explicit in this regard).
While Corbet’s third-directed feature has a variety of ideas and themes that appear in a wider canvas, The Testament of Ann Lee feels more stripped down and wants to reveal the emotions of Seyfried’s character. But Fastvold can never quite find the right tone to match these base-level themes and experiences Lee is going through, an unfortunate circumstance considering Seyfried puts her heart and soul into the performance.
The Testament of Ann Lee revels in not only understanding the philosophy of the Shakers but also depicting the ecstasy and suffering that came with being a part of this movement. Fastvold and Corbet’s scripts in their recent films have moved with a frenetic pace, and the beginning of Ann Lee is no different. It doesn’t take long to jump from Lee’s childhood to her and her brother, William (Lewis Pullman), to find the early Shaker movement in Manchester, England.
What follows is a musical sequence of pure jubilation and sexual release for Ann. Fastvold’s camera whips around the original Shaker house as dozens of actors freewheelingly dance and use their whole bodies to feel their god’s love. The first of many 70mm-shot musical sequences (courtesy of cinematographer William Rexer and Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg) is truly dazzling and makes one wonder how close to god Ann Lee really is.
The sequence also introduces Abraham Standerin (Christopher Abbott), Ann’s husband, who focuses only on having intercourse with her. But a fast-paced montage reveals that Ann lost all four of her children, which leads her to visions of god that help her become the leader of the Shakers and set the nascent movement’s agenda.
Seyfried, who has received praise for her other 2025 film, Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils, commands the presence of both the characters around her and the audience members watching her on a silver screen. Her character faces trials, tribulations and a near-meeting with god, demanding that anyone around her listen up as she has seen the face of god. There’s even a brief moment in a prison cell where it seems like Lee levitates, and Seyfried sells her ecstatic awe. She has a keen understanding of the ins and outs of her character’s emotions, leading to more spell-binding moments during more of the musical numbers.
The Testament of Ann Lee attempts to be more of an experiential and emotional examination of the titular character’s life. But the film uses some of the same storytelling devices as The Brutalist: using Thomasin McKenzie’s Mary as the narrator and framing character for the whole film (Raffey Cassidy played this role quietly in Corbet’s picture). Fastvold and Corbet look to show a different American epic, focused more on the country’s history with religion, but whose ideas have none of the depth that the Adrien Brody-led film had, especially when the film’s tension comes from an artist working within a cruel, capitalist system.
Ann Lee doesn’t really have that tension, and the tone suffers when it jumps from exciting musical sequences to a tail-end scene where violent mobs destroyed a Shaker temple and murdered William in front of Ann’s eyes. Another American epic on religion, Paul Thomas Anderson’s far superior The Master, features a clear tension between the non-believers of Lancaster Dodd and sycophants. Even The Brutalist lightly debates the merits of Zionism at its edges, adding further push-and-pull between an artist and capital. Fastvold’s lack of tone holds back the experience of Ann Lee being truly ascendant.
There has been plenty of good and persuasive criticism of Corbet and Fastvold’s ideas in The Brutalist. James Y. Lee put it well at the end of his critique for Film Obsessive: “In the end, binaries are woefully insufficient for a work that, from the onset, dares to aesthetically purport and aspire to be the next Great American Film. It is only all the more dispiriting that, for a time, The Brutalist’s purports and aspirations of greatness are unfathomably persuasive.”
I think this is how I generally feel about Fastvold’s film. The Testament of Ann Lee features musical sequences that perfectly channel the ecstasy and wrath of god all at once. Which is why it’s so disappointing that, despite its proportions and aspirations to be another great immigrant film about America, Fastvold’s film lacks a distinct pacing and tone that kept me at arm’s length.
