THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE
2025
Directed by Mona Fastvold
Written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold
You will have heard, in spite of the film's frankly perplexing series of across-the-board Oscar snubs, that The Testament of Ann Lee is good, or even great, and this is true enough. This comes as something of a retrospective surprise for me, because I hadn't recognized the name of its director and co-writer, Mona Fastvold, and hadn't noticed that its other co-writer was Fastvold's romantic/frequent creative partner Brady Corbet, the two having switched jobs after bringing us The Brutalist back in 2024. The Brutalist is a movie I respect more because I have to than because I actually approve of it, and I guess the single easiest way to understand why I like The Testament of Ann Lee so much more than that fucking slab is in their switch: going by The Brutalist, Corbet is a better filmmaker than he or Fastvold are writers, but going by Testament Fastvold is an enormously better filmmaker than she or Corbet are writers.
Both suffer, anyway, from similar problems: Testament is a true chronicle and The Brutalist is so desperate to pretend to be that they both have the same feeling of just picking up history while they aimlessly roll their respective ways downhill; they're both devoted to some level of miserableness as a foundational part of their aesthetic and philosophical approach; I say it mainly in the spirit of jest, but gosh, for movies written by romantic partners, do they ever have some concerningly disgusted attitudes towards sexuality. (There's obviously less of any way around that here.) To be fair to The Brutalist, they're admirable in similar ways, too, both shot primarily in Hungary, pretending to be the Midatlantic United States, and pulling it off seamlessly; and partly as a result of that location, but, really, we have to hand it to Fastvold and Corbet as managers, they're extremely frugal films—Testament, though a pain to get funded even at its humble tier, cost but a paltry $10 million—that never feel even slightly cheap. Now, I am burying a lede here: they also both had their music done by Daniel Blumberg; but I'm not at all sure I'd tell you that's something they actually share.
What Fastvold and Corbet have offered up in their screenplay is self-describing, concerning the life and ministry of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried, with Esmee Hewett and Millie Rose Crossley as younger versions), a founder of the United Society of Believers In Christ's Second Appearing—originally derisively known as the "Shaking Quakers," but these days acceptably called Shakers—and also their messiah, as these Quakers, having already somewhat splintered from the Society of Friends under the leadership of James and Jane Wardley (Scott Handy and Stacy Martin), have adopted the Wardleys' view that, given that all humankind is made in God's image, the second coming of Christ must, for completeness' sake, take the female form rather than the male. Ann, born in Britain in 1736 and introduced to the Wardleys a couple of decades later in 1758, fits that bill, and she becomes a major force in their Quaker subsect, and they believe her when she says she received during her imprisonment for blasphemy and public disorder a vision from God. In pursuit of this vision, Ann and the hardest core of her movement—including her husband Abraham Standerin (Christopher Abbott), her brother William (Lewis Pullman), her best friend Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), and financier John Hocknell (David Cale)—emigrate to New York in 1774, where they establish a semi-isolated community up the Hudson against the backdrop of the impending war, gaining new followers but losing some others along the way, principally because of that other most salient part of Ann's teachings regarding Shaker soteriology, besides her female manifestation of the second coming of Christ. This would be that the original sin of humankind, properly understood, truly is sexuality, up to and including (indeed, perhaps especially) its reproductive aspects, so even the sacrament of marriage is insufficient to render this acceptable in the eyes of God, and to be a Shaker in full is to accept Ann's maximalist interpretation of chastity, which largely suffices to explain why two and a half centuries later "Shakerism" is literally two or maybe three people.
Every atom of that is here, and as a script, this is one extreme form of the cradle-to-grave biopic. (And as far as its historical fidelity goes, that too is unusually high: only a couple of liberties manage to occur to me on that front, even after doing my homework, one being the film's bizarre insistence that the Dark Day of 1780 was the result of a lunar eclipse, apparently as an act of cinematic punching-up, though the Dark Day's hours of nightlike blackness was much more impressive than any dumb lunar eclipse. The other, of course, is that the Shakers' eponymous behavior, as shown in this movie, perhaps more resembles the community in its maturity rather than its early days, at least in its intricacy and sophistication. But this is what you'd call a "stupid" objection, and with that we'd be getting into what this movie is besides its script, which I don't yet wish to do.) Anyway, those atoms are there, though the script is sometimes fuzzier than it ought to be at resolving them; in fact, I don't strictly recollect the part where Ann declares herself Christ (or the fudging where she didn't quite declare herself Christ), which is part-and-parcel to it not being that interested in the Christology of Shakers, or in having a narrative about the communal origins of Shakerism in terms of the negotiations between its founders regarding what they've agreed to believe (the number of scenes "about" anyone other than Ann can, I think, be counted on just one hand, and many may not count as full "scenes"), though, not for this, and certainly not by any other means, will Testament ever make itself amenable to the kind of legitimately religious epic storytelling of e.g. your Greatest Stories Ever Told, where the tale's spiritual truth is assumed and its acceptance is part of the price of entry.
So if I've been implying it without saying it: this is, at least, not a conventionally good screenplay. It has all the narrative urgency of a Wikipedia article with no hyperlinks, and while I'm not convinced you could've ever rightly called it "a story", it definitely stops being one soon after their arrival in the Americas; in the configuration Fastvold and Corbet have chosen for their chronicle, I can see why they thought they needed it, but that encyclopedic sensation is magnified substantially by a whole lot of the film's "plot" arriving by way of voiceover narration, and they absolutely didn't need so damned much of it. The narrator is Mary, though I'll suggest it says something about the nature of Testament that, in McKenzie's roughly 10:1 ratio of voiceover to dialogue, I didn't realize the narrator was Ann's best friend, or, for that matter, that Ann had any best friend. Instead of relating a story, its operating mode is more of an exegesis of the psychology of Ann's particular brand of fanaticism, and part of the reason it's a cradle-to-grave biopic is so young Ann can come by her distaste for sexuality as early as possible, as a result of seeing her father give it to her mother, with dubious consent, in their cramped 18th century domicile, subsequently remarking on this over the next morning's breakfast, and getting her hands switched for bringing it up at all; this distaste follows her into her likewise-not-particularly-consensual marriage to Abraham, whose attempts to get her motor running with promises of God-touching orgasms, brought about by getting simultaneously railed and flailed, quickly dissipate into mechanical copulation even as his preferred proto-BDSM forms are maintained; and finally, with the consequences of that copulation, distaste becomes staunch hatred, as Ann experiences horrible pregnancy after horrible pregnancy with not a single surviving child as a reward for her suffering.
That all this might be related to Ann's prophetic condemnation of sex, marriage, and procreation is, get this, the movie's principal thesis; that the ecstatic dancing that the Shakers are famous for (and that set the stage for their schism with the Quakers) might in turn be a sanctified form of crypto-sexuality, and at least in this movie has a strong tendency to involve repetitive strikes to one's own body that make a "fap" noise and quickly begin to resemble masturbation in both their stereotyped motions and in the trancelike states they impose—I mean, not even mentioning Seyfried constantly rolling her big old eyes right into the back of her head—is the corollary of this thesis. Glibly, Ann Lee is down to fuck, but not with the flesh. And assuming you didn't already know this before you sat down to watch Testament, though as a practical matter you probably would, I can't so much as imagine not "getting" it before even forty minutes (maybe thirty) of its 137 minute have elapsed, and even then, I'm not sure the remainder of Testament ever takes these ideas (if they count as two ideas and not one) any further afterwards.
So with some hand-wringing, I'd have to tell you that its first half or even first third is blatantly the best part of it, when it still has some intellectual energy to extract from its analysis of its nice-seeming, slow-motion death cult started by a woman to make sense of her sexual traumas, insofar as that is like a story, and it can counterpoise Ann's joyful embrace of nonconforming religion with the cruelties of her attempts to live in conformity, and, not to be too snide, before this chronicle has acquired its unfulfilled need to explain why, say, William or Mary also achieved such a keen interest in Ann's no-fucking, all-dancing faith. (Abraham never did, incidentally, but hark—that'd be narrative conflict, so it eventually wanders off, which is just as well because I think a case could be made Fastvold secretly hates this Abbott guy; he was in her last directorial effort, The World To Come, playing a character with the same basic problem and a similar jerkassed response to it, though astonishingly this is the more measured and humane version.) So that's Testament at its best, and the rest of the movie is somewhat devoted to marking time, without offering much in the way of further elaboration on what was already a kind of obvious concept.
The thing is, Testament at its best is really, incredibly good; whereas just for being "obvious"—even for running out of new visual conceits and having to dole out the remaining novelties parsimoniously—I don't even begrudge it its length. This is where "Fastvold, the director" enters the picture, and where "Fastvold and Corbet, screenwriters" recede tremendously; and my initial instinct in this respect was to suppose that Robert Eggers has had just the most salutary effect on filmmakers from all over, but Fastvold has been pretty honed in on "period pieces set in upstate New York during the early Republic" for a goodly while, the aforementioned The World To Come (set in the 19th century) already arriving as early as 2020, pretty definitely not any direct response to The Witch, and to my understanding research for the 2020 movie's setting is the precise thing that inspired this one.
If nothing else, and with only minor exaggeration I might say it didn't do anything else (it's only barely okay), that film whetted Fastvold's aesthetic appetite for an almost-upsettingly tangible vision of the past, though where that one can feel more like only dipping a toe into the past, in terms of worldview, Testament feels a lot more like a confident, reckless dive. That's where the Eggers comparison would be coming from even if, having seen her previous film, I'm less certain that Eggers was a special influence, and if I had to guess, Fastvold's most proximate influences would've been Kelly Reichardt and maybe David Lowery. (And sure, Malick: the rankling thing about The World To Come being a trial run for Testament is that somehow Fastvold didn't fully absorb the lesson that that film should've taught any attentive filmmaker about the dangers of going overboard on voiceover narration, though, startlingly, The World To Come suffers even more from it.) Regardless, Eggers is a good touchstone for discussion. I can grouse that it isn't nearly as engaged with the politics of religious following as a necessary counterweight to its all-consuming interest in the psychology of religious fervor, so that its narrative universe is basically Ann Lee and its gaggle of non-Ann Lee ciphers (and even on the subject of religious fervor itself, I can grouse that it's irritating that Fastvold's managed some pretty neat-seeming Ken Russelesque freakout imagery when we only get to glimpse that imagery through the cracks in her montage), but it still damn well looks the part, and it feels the part, a tactile and persuasive vision of the past channeled through cinematographer William Rexer's efforts in pursuit of natural light (pretty superlative efforts considering how far to the side this is from 2020s underlighting despite risking obscurity every which way) and channeled even more fully through Seyfried herself, whom I've suggested has been asked to shoulder this entire film and—despite being armed only with more of a psychoanalysis of a character than an actual character—never falters, dragging her Testament even further towards a physical truth of 17XX than the craft departments already are.
And that's a necessary baseline but not, so much, the reasons to call it great. That comes by way of two things that are more like one thing: the way Fastvold and editor Sofia Subercaseaux are approaching this not-exactly-a-story chronicle, especially early on, less "telling a story" than smashing time into singularities with thematic montage and finding some pulverizing emotions—not even usually miserable ones, though the sequence that swirls around Ann's relationship to Abraham, her pregnancies and lost children, and her first days in Shakerism hits like a fucking tornado—and, like I mentioned many words ago, the musical contributions offered by Blumberg and composed give-and-take-like alongside Celia Rowlson-Hall's choreography. And as a result, the movie just moves like nothing you've ever likely seen before, I suppose with the spirit Ann herself perceives: the choreography is exceptionally beautiful, and, maybe surprisingly, doesn't even come close to wearing out its welcome, despite infrequently departing from its inherent limitations—though as it is, very much, a "real musical" and that's not just a category people are imposing upon it to describe something unique, it's relievingly cavalier about its relationship to its diegesis, while even managing to integrate some full-on, legitimate numbers into the kind of movie that has maybe never had such a thing integrated into it before. It does so most winsomely when God apparently grabs hold of John's finger, and, singing all the while, he bounds through rural New York pointing like a human compass.
That's Blumberg's part of the job, with a packed soundtrack of renovated Shaker hymns (taken from a wider chronological range than the movie encompasses, I'm sure) plus, as I understand it, a smattering of originals in "Shaker style," though I'm unconvinced that any of it is really "the Shaker style" or if that's even something Fastvold and Blumberg were intent on; what it is, instead, is a delirious collision of the contemporary with the early modern, or rather the twenty year old with the early modern, with this extravagantly weird vibe of 00s indie rock paired with Shaker lyrics, like if you told me Blumberg was an ex-member of, I don't know, Bastille, I'd have double-checked your claim but would've found it initially plausible. The bottom line is it sounds intoxicating, more-or-less intentionally hypnotic between the firm-but-gentle instrumentation and the rhythm set by Shaker hymns' apparent natural tendency towards repetitive, ticcish chant, which is inevitably emphasized by editing that's often doing largely the same thing. Meanwhile, the score outside of the avowed numbers is likewise real cool and sometimes jarring in its anachronism, e.g. when the Dark Day loses the softer music and is instead heralded by some totally rad shredding guitars. (So this is where that voiceover narration legitimately fucks Fastvold's movie up, and she needs some kind of intervention to keep her from doing it again: it's always burdensome, but it is obscene when McKenzie's Goddamn factoid-spewing pipes in to interrupts one of the fucking songs, an imposition even on the sound mix itself. Just unconscionable.)
Still, Rowlson-Hall is at the same fundamental work in her choreography (between this and Smile 2, Rowlson-Hall is a name I need to burn right into my brain); as I parenthetically suggested, it's not, at least I don't think, too much like an accurate snapshot of any specific point in the development of Shaker dance, because it wants to capture the most typifying elements of the whole century-or-so-long phenomenon instead, even when those elements are almost contradicting one another: so what we get can be deceptively chaotic in the manner of early Quaker/Shaker dance, as well as deceptively (or revealingly) sensual in the manner of this movie's suppositions regarding Shakerism's psychosexual dimensions (it's noticeable that men and women dance together, sometimes touching, and perhaps more often in separate cohorts but not nearly as separate as infinite chastity would seemingly demand), while also being very capable of spontaneous self-organization into complex geometries as if their individual—their human—consciousness has been surrendered, to something other and outside. And it's just awesome—I never got tired of watching Ann and her flock's writhing and breast-beating transform itself into smooth interleaving planes of texture and movement, like God separating the waters. I would like to report that The Testament of Ann Lee is a masterpiece on every front, but sometimes a movie gets by perfectly well just by excelling on a few.
Score: 8/10
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