The Testament of Ann Lee
Directed by Mona Fastvold
Written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Lewis Pullman and Christopher Abbott
Classification PG; 137 minutes
Opens in theatres Dec. 25
Critic’s Pick
Last year at about this time, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s The Brutalist became the most unlikely sensation of the season, a 3½-hour epic about architecture, anti-Semitism, and the false promises of the American dream. But for all the outre ideas and ambition of that film, it feels downright quaint, even mainstream compared to Corbet and Fastvold’s follow-up project, The Testament of Ann Lee.
Set in the 18th century and spanning decades and continents, the wonderful – and wonderfully peculiar – drama starring Amanda Seyfried follows the unlikely life of the title character, a British girl born in impoverished obscurity who gradually becomes the founder and spiritual leader of the Shakers religious sect. An offshoot of Christianity, which gained a brief foothold in British North America in the late 1700s before being all but wiped out, espoused a radical form of pacifism, gender equality, and celibacy, while their ceremonies of worship involved a kind of ecstatic “shaking” that resembled dancing by way of epileptic seizures. Did I mention that the film is also a musical?
Amanda Seyfried, centre, in The Testament of Ann Lee.Searchlight Pictures/The Associated Press
Corbet and Fastvold, who are partners in both life and art, have developed a unique system of cinematic trade-offs over the course of their union. Every other film, one of them takes up the director’s chair while the other handles the bulk of the producing work, with both of them sharing screenwriting credits. So far, the formula has worked and then some, with the couple knocking it out of the park four out of five times, by my estimate (only their debut collaboration, the 2014 drama The Sleepwalker, failed to register its intended impact). And while The Testament of Ann Lee is bound to confound more audiences than The Brutalist, it is by many measures a knottier, more immediately dazzling work.
It is also, for long stretches, a far more discomforting experience – the through-line that Fastvold and Corbet appear to be tracing here is that Lee sought the Shaker movement’s pure and chaste brand of spiritual uplift as a means of escape from the punishing reality of being a woman in 18th-century England. As a child she was beaten. As a young bride to a cruel blacksmith (Christopher Abbott), she was raped, and then so pressured into bearing children that she gave birth four times, each child dying shortly thereafter.
Seyfried, left, and Lewis Pullman in The Testament of Ann Lee.Searchlight Pictures/The Associated Press
Lee’s life doesn’t exactly get easier once she and her fellow Shakers – including her brother William (Lewis Pullman) – sail across the Atlantic, with their ideals drawing fear and persecution from the British North Americans who don’t buy her brand of godliness. Composer Daniel Blumberg, who reunites with Fastvold and Corbet after his stirring work on The Brutalist, soundtracks the film with traditional Shaker hymns – foot-stomping tracks that replicate the beating of an especially strong heart – but the most frequent sounds in Ann Lee’s world are deep, guttural wails. These are sometimes exclamations of pure joy, but more often than not they echo unceasing pain. (The standout track is titled Hunger & Thirst, to give you a better idea.)
Still, there is more than a flicker of wry wit to Fastvold’s directorial choices, with the film occasionally slipping into a Monty Python-like sensibility, especially during the eccentrically choreographed dance sequences. The subject matter is serious, but like, say, Guy Pearce’s barking-mad performance in The Brutalist, there is room in The Testament of Ann Lee for a wink and a nudge, too.
Seyfried, centre, in The Testament of Ann Lee.The Associated Press
Seyfried, who has already cemented her status as one of today’s most beguiling and unpredictable performers – any other actress would get whiplash going from playing tech-schemer Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout to a betrayed opera virtuoso in Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils to the sudsy theatrics of last week’s The Housemaid to this – is simply phenomenal. In interviews, Seyfried said she approached the singing here as not something beautiful or melodic, exactly, but more animalistic, “like a woman on her knees.” And it is just that note of last-gasp desperation that makes her performance, which occupies almost every frame of the film, so entrancing.
For The Brutalist, Fastvold and Corbet got lucky with Adrien Brody – he only joined the project after scheduling issues caused original star Joel Edgerton to depart. Still, you can imagine – if you stretch your mind just so and squint real hard – that The Brutalist might work with any number of today’s leading men. With Ann Lee, it feels as if any other actress than Seyfried would be a false prophet. God bless her.