FILM OF THE WEEK: The Testament of Ann Lee - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

With the Academy Awards landing this weekend - that annual orgy of prestige cinema, campaigning and gilded statuettes – I want to return to and highlight a film still in cinemas and inexplicably absent from Awards chatter.

Mona Fastvold’s sprawling, strange, and mesmerising The Testament of Ann Lee acts as a reminder of how many ambitious films exist entirely outside the awards conversation. Despite the scale of its craft, the audacity of its form, and a career-best performance from Amanda Seyfried, Fastvold’s film has been largely absent from the nominations. Watching it, you can’t help feeling the Oscars may simply not know what to do with something this peculiar.

Fastvold, who co-wrote last year’s monumental The Brutalist with her husband and frequent collaborator Brady Corbet, turns to the life of Ann Lee, the eighteenth-century religious visionary who founded the Shaker movement. The result is neither a traditional biopic nor a conventional period drama. It's something far stranger: an austere colonial epic that repeatedly erupts into ecstatic, body-driven musical ritual.

The film traces Lee’s life from poverty in industrial Manchester through the formation of the Shaker sect and the eventual voyage to America, where the group attempts to build a utopian community founded on celibacy, equality and communal labour. Across roughly forty years of history, Lee transforms from traumatised factory worker to spiritual leader whose followers believe that she embodies the female incarnation of Christ.

Fastvold approaches this history with bold stylistic ambition. Stretches of the film unfold through choreographed worship: bodies shaking, stamping, clutching their chests, arms reaching skyward in spasms of devotion. The choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall is extraordinary - raw, almost feral in its physicality - and Fastvold shoots it with hypnotic patience. One extraordinary sequence turns the transatlantic crossing into a song-and-dance passage of time: sun-bleached decks giving way to lashing wind and rain as the pilgrims’ movements continue in stubborn synchrony, their faith expressed through the collective rhythm of the body.

The music - built around Shaker spirituals and arranged by Daniel Blumberg - is equally distinctive. Rather than lush period melodies, Blumberg’s score pulses with metallic percussion, dissonant strings and waves of choral sound layered with Seyfried’s sweet melodies. The effect is utterly immersive, creating a sonic world where devotion feels sometimes sweet and enticing, sometimes almost physically contagious.

At the centre of it all is Seyfried, giving the kind of performance that anchors a film even when its structure threatens to float away. Ann Lee is stern, wounded and luminous all at once: a woman who seems carved from conviction, yet flickers with moments of vulnerability. Seyfried sings beautifully (though the songs themselves are less memorable than the physical intensity surrounding them) and her extraordinary eyes carry much of the film’s emotional weight. Even when the narrative drifts into repetition, she remains magnetic.

Still, for all its spectacle, The Testament of Ann Lee sometimes struggles to trust in the quiet. While the externalised and embodied portrayal of faith is powerful and evocative, there’s a lack of interiority that prevents the film from immersing the audience in its belief system. As we are invited to witness the breast-thumping, body shaking ecstasy, but not necessarily feel it ourselves. Quieter moments achieve this. A scene where Ann Lee refuses food and water while imprisoned, before she begins to sing a gentle, lilting song, crooning “I hunger and thirst for true righteousness”, feels private, intimate and emotive in a way that the performative group worship scenes do not. More intimate scenes, stripped of choreography and spectacle, may have allowed the film to fully inhabit her inner world rather than observe it.

Still, the power of the embodiment in the film can’t be understated. As well as many (possibly too many) scenes of group worshipping, the way birth, sex and violence are depicted are powerful, feeling far more transgressive and bold than, say Hamnet, where women remain clothed during both sex and birth, and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, which despite some deliciously playful subplot and foreplay scenes, was conservative in its portrayal of sex and body, remaining in the realm of fully-clothed vanilla sex between its two leads.

The Testament Of Ann Lee is remarkable for its unapologetic portrayal of the body. Scenes of Ann giving birth, losing babies, struggling to breastfeed, enduring sex, being physically assaulted, and having her body examined and violated by attackers are visceral without feeling exploitative (something Maggie Gyllenhaals’ The Bride! struggled with.)

A montage showing Ann’s increasingly traumatic births, followed by a scene where she speaks to women in their early twenties who have had seven children, only some of whom have survived while the women are left ravaged by this violent ordeal of bodily and psychic trauma, gives Ann’s belief system a psychological underpinning.  The pull of a religion that champions celibacy and gender equality is understandable in a world where women are expected to endlessly endure pregnancy, miscarriage, still births, risk of death, grief – and then also be expected to perform domestic and physical labour while fulfilling their husbands’ sexual needs.

The film’s most powerful insight is that this religious extremity may have been, in part, a desperate strategy of survival. The film leaves this implicit rather than looking for irony or explanation, which works particularly well not only because modern irony can undercut emotional immersion, but because the film itself feels oddly in tune with a broader cultural mood. Across contemporary pop music and performance art, there has been a resurgence of imagery that blends feminine ecstasy with religious or pagan symbolism, from Rosalía’s saint-inspired LUX to the theatrical ritualism of The Last Dinner Party, and the pagan romanticism that has long run through Florence + The Machine. Fastvold’s film feels aligned with this aesthetic moment: a vision of female spirituality expressed not through quiet piety but through overwhelming physical release.

Visually, the film is stunning, and the lack of recognition for it at the Academy Awards is unforgivable. William Rexer’s chiaroscuro cinematography and Samuel Bader’s meticulous production design produce images that resemble austere eighteenth-century paintings: figures arranged in precise tableaux, every object placed with devotional care. Fastvold frames her scenes like living museum pieces, each shot carefully composed yet alive with movement.

And yet, despite these remarkable elements, the film occasionally buckles under the weight of its own ambition. The chaptered structure begins to feel repetitive, the historical sweep bloated, the supporting performances rarely matching Seyfried’s intensity. What begins as a thrillingly eccentric vision sometimes drifts into stately pageantry.

Still, even at its most uneven, The Testament of Ann Lee remains a film of striking conviction. The Oscars may have overlooked it. But there are moments - when the dancers stamp the earth, when Seyfried’s voice lifts into the strange metallic chorus, when the entire congregation seems to shake itself toward transcendence - when Fastvold’s film comes startlingly close to making believers of us all.

• Watch the trailer below: