In 1772 Ann Lee received a divine revelation while serving a prison sentence. Christ appeared and gave her a new gospel to preach: that salvation could only be achieved through public confession and complete sexual abstinence.
After her release, she became the leader of the small, radical offshoot of the Quakers to which she belonged, called “Shakers” due to the ecstatic dancing and trembling that characterized their worship. Her followers hailed her not only as a prophet but as the second coming of Christ in female form. Chafing under religious intolerance, they abandoned England for America in 1774 and established a settlement near Albany. To outsiders, Ann Lee was a madwoman, a dangerous nonconformist and a sexual deviant; but to her faithful, “Mother Ann” was the promise of God fulfilled, the living Word, “the woman clothed with the sun.”
In the new film “The Testament of Ann Lee,” the Shaker leader receives a biopic as unconventional as she was. Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written with her partner Brady Corbet (the same team behind last year’s “The Brutalist”), the film is a staggering, beautiful and strange epic about the costs and glories of faith. It is also, believe it or not, a musical.
We meet Ann (Amanda Seyfried) as a child growing up in sooty, crowded 18th-century Manchester, and witness her early disillusionment with the world and the flesh. As a young woman she is married to Abraham (Christopher Abbott), a brusque man who is sexually demanding even after Ann loses four children in infancy. Her saving grace is her faith, expressed through charismatic prayer meetings at the home of a prominent Quaker, Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin).
The first of these meetings makes it clear why Fastvold made this story a musical. While the Shakers’ spirituality stresses simplicity in daily life, their worship is passionate and physical. We first see Seyfried at the center of a whirling, writhing room of the faithful. The camera follows her as she careens through the house, spinning and leaping, with hair flying and face flushed. The choreography is dynamic, and it all looks beautiful thanks to Fastvold and cinematographer William Rexer. But the musical sequences are more than an interesting filmmaking conceit: Through them you glimpse what was so electrifying about Shaker worship, how attractive it would have been to a woman living in a repressed and stratified society. When she dances, Ann is freed from the constraints of gender and custom, connected in a radical way to her friends and to God.
Of course, this worship was also controversial, precisely because it broke down the rigidly defined lines between the sexes. After a constabulary raid on a Shaker service, Ann spends several days in jail, where she receives the revelation described above. Convinced that England is infertile ground to spread her message, Ann arranges passage to America along with a small group of followers, including her brother William (Lewis Pullman) and the devoted Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie). With the help of a wealthy benefactor, John Hocknell (David Cale), she establishes a utopian community near Albany marked by gender and racial equality. Ann’s powerful witness attracts converts but also condemnation, especially as the Shakers’ pacifism clashes against the rising tide of the American Revolution.
Fastvold and Corbet largely succeed at a tricky tonal balance: The text of the film is earnest hagiography, while the subtext is fairly skeptical. The film allows you to suspect, for instance, that Ann’s aversion to sex is more psychological than spiritual, and that her divine revelation may have been inspired by food deprivation and exhaustion. It is also clear-eyed about the fact that a religious community that prohibits procreation is essentially setting its own expiration date. The film doesn’t condemn the Shakers, but it does invite you to reflect uneasily on cults of personality. How much of their faith comes from genuine religious encounter, and how much from the magnetic force of Ann Lee herself? Whether or not you admire what she created—and the film does highlight some of the more admirable aspects of Shakerism—that is a worrying amount of power for anyone to have.
Thanks to Seyfried’s performance, you believe in Ann Lee’s power. Seyfried has always been an incredible, and underrated, actress (beginning with her hilarious turn in “Mean Girls”), but this may be the best work of her career. Her physicality alone is extraordinary, but Seyfried marries it to profound emotional depth and nuance, embodying Ann Lee both as a force of prophecy and an all-too-human woman. Seyfried has appeared in musicals before (“Mamma Mia” and “Les Miserables”) but has never had a better showcase for her lovely, lilting voice. Watching Seyfried, you understand why people would follow this woman across the ocean, and would believe her when she claimed to be God’s representative on Earth.
In one of the film’s best sequences, the Shakers sing the hymn “All is Summer” on the deck of a ship during their transatlantic voyage. The weather changes around them—gray skies and blue, sun and snow—but their prayer remains constant as they sing of the promise of heaven. At the center is Ann, a living dynamo of belief, every movement testifying to her faith. It’s an exhilarating, stirring scene that succeeds because it forces you, just for a moment, to lay your skepticism aside and appreciate Ann’s (and Seyfried’s) rare electricity. You can doubt her prophecy, but you can’t deny her power.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” arrives in theaters on December 25.
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