The Testament of Ann Lee
Mona Fastvold (2025)
It’s hard not to respect Mona Fastvold’s ambition and strength of purpose in making a musical biopic about an eighteenth-century religious pioneer who opposed marriage in the belief that Adam and Eve’s original sin was fornication. Harder still not to find the result tiresome and often ridiculous. The numerous song and dance bits – repetitious chants with matching choreography, performed by Ann Lee and her fellow Shakers – are one reason why but, to be fair, they’re also part of The Testament of Ann Lee’s more imaginative qualities. Fastvold’s literal-mindedness can be just as much a problem. For example, every time someone on horseback appears on the screen (which is quite often), an equine noise arrives on the soundtrack. ‘Horse whinnies’, the film’s audio description dutifully records; occasionally, to ring the changes, ‘Horse whinnies and neighs’.
Born in Manchester in 1736, Ann Lee works as a child in a cotton factory and, a few years later, as a hospital cook. Under the influence of Jane and James Wardley, local Quakers, Ann becomes devoutly religious. She marries Abraham Standerin, who’s also part of the Wardleys’ circle, and is soon a leading member of the ‘shaking Quakers’, so named for their ecstatic, highly dynamic form of worship. When she and others disrupt a conventional church service, Ann is arrested and imprisoned for fourteen days, during which time she refuses to eat or drink, has a vision of herself levitating, and perceives where Adam and Eve went wrong. The Wardleys have already been preaching that Christ’s Second Coming will be in female form. On her release from prison, Ann shares her insights with co-religionists; all decide she must be the awaited female Messiah. When this claim generates more local hostility, Ann and her followers decide to leave England and head for New England.
For the film’s audience, Ann’s revelation that sexual intercourse is fundamentally wrong isn’t a bolt from the blue. As children, Ann (Millie Rose Crossley) and her younger brother William (Harry Conway) sleep in the same room as their mother (Maria Sand) and father (Willem van der Vegt). When pre-teen Ann catches sight of her parents making love one night, she’s horrified. During a family meal next day, she tells her father that she knows ‘what you do to her’ and he beats his daughter’s hands in punishment. The adult Ann (Amanda Seyfried) marries Abraham (Christopher Abbott) within a few screen seconds of first seeing him and we naturally wonder if her childhood aversion will lead to problems in the bedroom. Not at first. Lying in bed beside Abraham, Ann listens to her husband, a blacksmith by trade but clearly a bookworm by nature, discourse eloquently on his current reading matter – Jean-Baptiste de Boyer’s Thérèse Philosophe (a novel usually classed as French ‘libertine literature’ but significantly anti-Catholic too). Ann is less content with Abraham’s liking for sexual sadomasochism, but she gives birth to four children.
All four die as babies. Mona Fastvold overused the protagonist’s voiceover in her previous film, The World to Come (2020). She does so again in The Testament of Ann Lee, where the narration is voiced throughout by Ann’s loyal friend, Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie). In The World to Come, Fastvold also had a maddening habit of showing and telling simultaneously: as her capable actors expressed through face and body what was happening in a scene, Fastvold sometimes had her heroine Abigail explain their feelings in voiceover. Although that doesn’t quite happen in this latest film, you don’t expect, after being informed by Mary that Ann’s children all died in infancy, then to watch repeated scenes of childbirth and child death.
As six-year-old Ann (Esmee Hewett) and little William (Benjamin Bagota) head to church, she instructs him to hurry, and he does as he’s told. Mary’s voice then tells us that, as William learned to keep pace, sister and brother would move ‘in lockstep’. That hardly describes their future relationship, which sees Ann always making the running, William following in her footsteps. His obedience extends to sexual abstinence. In a scene that comes out of nowhere, the man William (Lewis Pullman) and a male lover lie in bed together. William gets up, telling the other man, ‘We will have to say our farewells tonight. You have been a great friend to me, Jacob’. William then sits in front of a mirror to cut his long hair. This presumably symbolises the sloughing off an old, sinful skin before embarking on his new, celibate life.
Plenty of older siblings order younger ones about, but Ann is a precociously moralising bossyboots: even as a young girl, she’s telling William, ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place’ – a maxim repeated over the course of Ann Lee, right through to Mary’s closing words, following Ann’s death, at the age of forty-eight, in the Shaker settlement she founded in Niskayuna, New York. On the sea voyage to America, the Shakers, through their noisy rituals, make themselves unpopular with the captain, crew and other passengers – until the ship is caught in a violent storm but, thanks to the Shakers’ fervent prayers, doesn’t sink. ‘They were left to pray in peace for the rest of the journey,’ says Mary, although peace isn’t really the word. I couldn’t suppress the bad thought that some on board might have wondered if the Shakers’ racket wasn’t a fate worse than drowning.
Perhaps inevitable with this leading lady that Ann Lee is bereft of (intentional) humour, but Mona Fastvold is evidently drawn to solemn female protagonists. I haven’t seen her first feature, The Sleepwalker (2014), but Abigail in The World to Come, a woman in unhappy circumstances though with little of Ann’s religious conviction, wore her miserable heart on her sleeve. In press interviews, Fastvold has described the unsurprising difficulties of getting funding for a ‘$10m Shaker musical’. How did she and her partner Brady Corbet, who shares the screenplay credit with Fastvold, manage it? Ann Lee and The World to Come could both be termed feminist period pieces (the earlier film is set in the mid-nineteenth century). Abigail’s misery is relieved by a lesbian romance with a neighbour and Ann, though implacably opposed to sex, isn’t without commercial appeal, as both a victim of patriarchy and a thorn in its side: accused of heresy in England and witchcraft in Niskayuna, she’s undaunted in claiming to be the new incarnation of Christ. The sect she leads, despite their espousal of celibacy, advocates gender equality and pacifism. Fastvold has described her film as a ‘speculative retelling’ of Ann’s story: on the one hand, she speculates that Abraham, in effect a baddie, sexually exploited Ann deplorably; on the other, that William, a goodie, was naturally gay. Ticking several woke boxes may have helped sell the project to the production and distribution companies involved.
Not surprising either that Fastvold shows relatively little interest in Ann’s ability to justify her extraordinary theology. Abraham accompanies her to America, supposedly because he thinks a blacksmith can make a good living there; for the same reason, he stays in New York City when, soon after the group’s arrival, Ann dispatches William and the other men north to look out land for a settlement. In their New York lodgings, Abraham, infuriated by Ann’s forswearing of sex, reminds his wife of her marriage vows; in reply, she simply insists that she will ‘never consent to violate my duty to God’. We also learn from this showdown that Ann can’t read or write, Abraham bitterly demanding to know if her followers ‘know their Mother Ann to be illiterate’ and ‘how does one contribute to scripture if thou cannot stable a quill?’ She doesn’t answer either question. This set-to marks Abraham’s last appearance in the film, and the matter of Ann’s illiteracy isn’t mentioned again. Nor is her conviction that Adam and Eve committed fornication in the Garden of Eden, even though God made them ‘one flesh’, ever disputed. You realise, of course, that Ann relies on personal charisma rather than scriptural expertise to compel her followers to share her belief in salvation through ‘toil and chastity’. You’re nevertheless aware that this unquestioning obedience to ‘Mother Ann’ suits Mona Fastvold’s purposes.
Ann does lose, as well as Abraham, a couple of those who made the journey to America with her. (The Wardleys (Scott Handy and Stacy Martin) stay in Manchester.) The transatlantic voyage is funded by wealthy farmer John Hocknell (David Cale), a new Shaker recruit. While at sea, Hocknell’s son Richard (Jamie Bogyo) falls in love with Nancy (Viola Prettejohn), referred to as Ann’s niece (I didn’t understand who Nancy’s parents were). In New York Nancy and Richard’s romance progresses and they leave Ann to marry. The Niskayuna population grows, however, thanks to making converts and adopting foundling children. The last part of Ann Lee majors in the oppression of the Shaker community, especially Ann. She’s arrested for insisting that the community remain neutral during the American War of Independence. After being released, she leads a crusade to establish other Shaker settlements in New England. During a recruitment drive at a farm, several of Ann’s group are killed by a mob. Ann is injured and stripped by a gang of men who question her gender. Mary is blinded in one eye during the farm attack, but lives to tell the tale.
Daniel Blumberg drew on Shaker hymns to write the songs and chants. I’ve admired his scores for The World to Come and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024) and I guess I admire his work on Ann Lee too, despite finding it far from easy listening. As she showed as Meryl Streep’s daughter in Mamma Mia! (2008) and as Cosette in Les Misérables (2012), Amanda Seyfried is an accomplished and versatile singer; performing a very different kind of music here, she certainly extends her range. As befits a child of Meryl Streep, Seyfried also proves in Ann Lee that she can do a foreign accent, yet it’s not completely satisfying. Seyfried has mastered a Lancashire accent technically but, perhaps because she’s concentrating so hard on maintaining it, doesn’t always get the right rhythm into her lines – though she fares better than her fellow American Lewis Pullman and than David Cale, even though he grew up in England. Thomasin McKenzie, a New Zealander, copes well with the Lancashire accent: even though, as already noted, Mary Partington has far too much voiceover, the job of narration means that McKenzie rarely needs to speak colloquially, which probably makes it easier to hold the accent. The best British actor in the cast is Matthew Beard, though his role, as a young man who is part of the Wardleys’ group then follows Ann to America, doesn’t amount to much. Daniel Blumberg appears briefly in the New York part of the story, alongside Tim Blake Nelson, as local churchmen that join the Shakers.
Although the throbbing insistency of the chants gives the film’s musical bits a sexual implication, the Shakers’ commitment to celibacy doomed them inevitably to extinction in the long run. Fastvold ends The Testament of Ann Lee with the relevant stats on screen. The Shakers’ energetic efforts to make converts to the cause resulted in a gradual growth of Shaker numbers to a peak of five to six thousand members in the US by the mid-nineteenth century. Today, there are three active members in the last remaining Shaker village, in Maine. The film’s full title, also according to on-screen text, is ‘The Testament of Ann Lee or the Woman Clothed by the Sun with the Moon Under Her Feet’ – the latter phrases quoting the Book of Revelation. The sun isn’t otherwise in evidence much in Mona Fastvold’s film (William Rexer did the cinematography). Natural light aka darkness reigns almost continuously in Manchester although things brighten up a bit in the New World.
4 March 2026