Ann Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Manchester blacksmith, was born on the 29th of February, 1736 — “as one might expect of a miraculous person,” explains Sister Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie). From the beginning of her life she was preoccupied by the things of God. From the start she was repulsed by sex and magnetized by whole-body worship of the divine. And before too long, she would be the leader of one of the most influential religious sects in the New World.
But it would all happen in a very strange way, and that is the story told in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” Mona Fastvold’s singular, astonishing, otherworldly biographical musical about the founder and spiritual leader of the Shakers. That’s a lot of adjectives, I know, but I can’t pick one to remove — and even those don’t quite capture how unusual and terrific this movie is. That it may not be to everyone’s taste, or to yours, feels almost besides the point. When an artist takes a swing this colossal and stays true to their vision in every way, the resulting work deserves respect, and is always worth seeing.
Many movies about historical characters — especially those who might be considered eccentric or possibly delusional — stand the audience on the outside, looking in with some mixture of skepticism and curiosity. But “The Testament of Ann Lee” is relentlessly interior, unceasingly convinced of its protagonist’s trustworthiness. When she has a vision, we are with her. When she experiences pain, we shudder. When she feels joy, we feel it too. The point is not to analyze, or even to be educated, but to be swept away in her ecstasy.
Fastvold, who wrote the screenplay with Brady Corbet (the couple, partners in real life and art, last collaborated on Corbet’s film “The Brutalist”), approaches the life of Ann Lee (a spectacular Amanda Seyfried) as if it were an account being imparted to us because we have expressed interest in joining her community — in following Mother Ann, as she came to be called. Thus we must enter the full immersive experience, much like the Shakers’ own way of worshiping God, which involves singing and dancing in intricate patterns, losing oneself in the exultation. When you confess sin, or even temptation, your body also will shake as the sin is expelled and your body is purified. You will tremble, and writhe, and spin, and beat your breast, and you will be filled with light.
This embodied spirituality was not all that common in Mother Ann’s day. By the 18th century, rationalism and the intellectualism of Deism were in vogue, and even more evangelical revivals, often involving men like George Whitefield and John Wesley, emphasized piety, conversion and emotional connection to God, but not quite this level of physical abandon. What the Shakers were up to was different than most other groups. Humanity, as they said, was created in God’s likeness, and was male and female. So of course, women ought to preach, and Christ would return to earth in the form of a woman. That woman was Mother Ann.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” captures, in a sweeping, lyrical and often strange form, a version of the legend of Mother Ann, as told by her adherents. (There’s some fudging of details here and there for timelines’ sake, but on the whole it’s fairly true to the story that’s still told.) Looking for closeness to God, she and her beloved brother William (Lewis Pullman, who is terrific) joined a sect founded by Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin) and her husband, James (Scott Handy). There she encountered the dancing, shaking way of purging oneself of sin and became a leader.
There she also met Abraham (Christopher Abbott), a blacksmith, who became her husband. But after four births and four harrowing infant deaths, plus time in an infirmary and later in prison, she became convinced that “fornication” — that is, any sexual intercourse at all, including between married people — was the reason for humankind’s separation from God. That revelation and others elevated her to the leader of the sect, and she led a small group to America, where she and her people could find religious freedom and found God’s church on earth.
The story is narrated by Sister Mary, who becomes Mother Ann’s right hand. But her words take a back seat in this telling to what we are seeing and the music we are hearing. Most of the songs are Shaker hymns, reworked by Daniel Blumberg into haunting melodies; he also composed three original songs for the film. Choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall creates movement that sometimes draws on traditional Shaker dances and sometimes feels wilder, more interpretive of the characters’ inner emotions.
The beating heart of the film, though, is Mother Ann. Seyfried plays her with absolute commitment, a woman who has seen the whole truth of history and the cosmos and is prepared to chase her devotion to the end of the earth. Mother Ann never wavers, and Seyfried’s performance never does either. Mother Ann embraced everything that the religious and cultural world around her did not: religious freedom, simplicity, chastity, worshiping God with the whole body. She sensed, if not outright believed, that in her time sex was a tool to subjugate women, and that abstaining from it would be a tool for perfect equality. She believed in utopia. And she believed she would build one.
And somehow she believed it through almost unfathomable bodily and mental suffering. Watching “The Testament of Ann Lee,” I tried to imagine what film was like it, and the closest I could get was Robert Eggers’s “The Witch.” Both take their characters’ mental landscape, as shaped by the world they live in — alive with spirits and the divine and evil and good — to be absolutely serious, fundamentally real. And both are about a woman struggling, in ways both spiritual and physical, against patriarchal structures in her search for meaning.
Yet where “The Witch” is a horror film, in which the end result is a rejection of God, “The Testament of Ann Lee” is somehow the precise opposite. That’s not for lack of the requisite elements. There is blood and brutality and moments of genuine terror in this movie, and I think in anyone’s hands other than Fastvold’s, it would have been a horror film.
But there’s no genre to describe what it is instead, like a reversed photo negative. Euphoria, perhaps. Everything that is happening — the miracles, the tribulations, the revelations, the joy — it is all real to these characters, and most of all to Mother Ann. Watching it with your whole being, it becomes real to you too.
The Testament of Ann Lee Rated R for beatings, blood, some nudity, traumatic live birth and some other disturbing images. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
The post ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ Review: A Woman Clothed With the Sun appeared first on New York Times.
