TIFF ’25: The Testament of Ann Lee

Ann Lee
***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott
written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
directed by Mona Fastvold

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024’s The Brutalist. “We firmly believe,” he said, pointing to Fastvold’s ownership of and final cut on the film, “that you can only serve one master at a time.” To say nothing of the film’s numerous aesthetic and thematic echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, not to mention those of their previous project, Corbet’s comment is an interesting critical pathway into an often impenetrably busy, ambitious work that, when one breaks it down, is about both a marriage in tension and a husband working in service–far more glumly than the gregarious Corbet–to his spouse’s singular vision of the world. Pricklier than the more awards-friendly The Brutalist, though vulnerable to the same structural imbalances and ambiguity, The Testament of Ann Lee is a pleasantly odd text: a rich, overstuffed period musical that makes a grand figure of its impossibly marginal fringe subject.

That protagonist is the titular eighteenth-century founder of the Shaker sect, played with body-quivering intensity and doe-eyed sincerity through her adult years by Amanda Seyfried, who builds on her already career-high work in Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils from earlier this year. Ann’s future disciple Mary (Thomasin McKenzie) narrates her Holy Mother’s life story–sometimes in prose, sometimes in songs adapted from real Shaker hymns by composer Daniel Blumberg–from her humble origins as a preternaturally grave, illiterate child of a blacksmith working the loom with her brother William (played as an adult by Lewis Pullman) in Manchester’s textile industry. Pious and sharply averse to matters earthly since she witnessed her ogre father’s sexual overtures to her mother in their cramped family sleeping quarters (which inspire mental images of a snake in the garden), Ann is first called to serve as a religious steward when she encounters the unorthodox members of the Wardley Society, a sect of Quakers who physically expunge their confessions of impurity in a raucous dance ritual that Ann immediately clocks as a suitably embodied substitute for physical intimacy. This doesn’t preclude her marrying sulky dirtbag Abraham (Christopher Abbott), a blacksmith, like her father, whose fetishistic appetites dovetail with his religious severity, and conceiving four children, all of whom die in infancy. Bereft and radicalized by her trauma, Ann emerges from back-to-back turns in the sanitarium and prison, where she is locked up for her heretic views, with a renewed vision of a religion founded on celibacy and a kind of full-bodied confessional experience, which Fastvold represents as a series of well-choreographed song-and-dance numbers. Persecuted in her native England as a demonic woman priest who calls herself her parishioners’ Mother, she ventures out for the potentially more easygoing and receptive climes of 1770s America, where she is not exactly received with open arms.

Fastvold’s tantric, hyper-edited, 70mm-musical treatment of this obscure, thorny material, presented in three parts with title cards containing chapter headings and woodcut images and fussy typeset, is in some ways of a piece with The Brutalist‘s novelistic portrait of an American curio forged from the cultural fires of the first half of the twentieth century. Fastvold, too, deliberately bumps up against the limitations of film form in a project that plays more like a feverish literary biography from the period, exhumed from a rare books library and a revivalist church service, than either a traditional biopic or historical epic. Yet where The Brutalist struggled at times to flesh out the aesthetic and ideological import of its protagonist’s work, turning him into a devoted project manager who occasionally rhymes off cryptic philosophical bromides about brutalism (“Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?”), The Testament of Ann Lee is more firmly anchored in the ephemera of a real person with a documented belief system and a cultural legacy, however questionable and liminal it may seem in 2025. It’s also perceptive and funny, offering a wide range of both ironic and sincere audience surrogates in the form of Mary (a comically staunch believer who sees whatever Mother wants her to see, including thinking she speaks 72 languages despite her illiteracy), William (who is secretly gay but agrees to forego his sex life for the love of his sister), and Abraham. Where most of the others quickly adopt Ann’s prohibition on sex, Abraham is immediately and consistently skeptical, warily tiptoeing into a tableau of the faithful gathered around his wife and Mother when she announces their stingy new rules against cohabitation, looking like he’s about to be executed.

But neither these flourishes nor the spirited musical sequences quite make up for the repetitive, deflationary last third, where enemies of Ann’s gospel materialize in print missives, only to soon follow in physical form because the historical record dictates they must. Despite a colourful supporting performance by Tim Blake Nelson as a rival brimstone preacher turned follower, Ann’s time in America is mostly dreary stuff. It’s full of incidental observations like her objections to slavery and her preference for pacifism over American revolutionary sentiment. These feel more like checklist entries in her posthumous hagiography by Mary than the morally spotted biography Fastvold is otherwise after.

Still, the enigma at the centre of the film–“the woman clothed by the sun,” as Mary calls her in the opening hype song–strikes a compelling enough figure on which to expend some interpretive energy. Like Lancaster Dodd, Ann is a cult figure offering a superficially redemptive but ultimately transactional master-servant relationship that psychologically benefits both sides–with the exception of Abraham, ever on the edge of that tableau. Is Ann merely displacing her longtime aversion to icky bodies and labouring without profit (to say nothing of her birthing trauma) onto her religious views on sexuality and reproduction? Is the Shaker ritual a mostly safe release valve for the messy erotic energy that would otherwise burst through this pressurized community? Does she starve herself deliberately to evoke the images on which she founds her faith? Does she trade in such images in the first place because she’s both an illiterate grifter and a subordinated woman who has to forge some way, any way, to power? Fastvold and Seyfried entertain all of the above, even as they allow for the intriguing possibility that after all that time in the cotton mills and in the sanitarium and in labour, she might just feel entitled to call herself Mother. Programme: Special Presentations