Having hated 2018’s self-satisfied pop-world satire Vox Lux, personal and professional partners Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet’s last foray into the musical (or, more accurately, musical-adjacency), their newest project comes as an often rousing relief. Also the duo’s first entrée into proper (for them) biographical filmmaking, the song-and-dance-bountiful The Testament of Ann Lee vaults back to the 18th century to tell the cut-short life story of its Manchester-born title subject, a self-appointed messianic figure who starts her own religious sect. Her adherents call themselves the Shakers. 

Excluding the group’s belief that sex outside marital procreation beckons tragic punishment from God — a stance borne of Lee’s four premature child deaths — the Shakers’ vision is impressively progressive for its time. In the isolated hamlet they start for themselves after a long and punishing voyage to New England, they practice gender and racial equality and a vision of labor that swaps exploitation for skill-forwardedness and an eye kept on greater communal good. And there are no binding restrictions on or frightening consequences for those who defect.

The Shakers are not, naturally, very popular with their neighbors. It isn’t, for one, pleased with their nearly round-the-clock, heard-from-miles-away singing and dancing, which the Shakers see as manifestations of their spiritual connectedness. (Not so much, as is expected for the musical genre, narrative interruptions as chorus-agnostic emotional heightenings, The Testament of Ann Lee’s frantically choreographed and unflashily sung musical moments are when it’s most riveting, evoking, whether or not you’re religious, the feeling of being consumed by something that feels transcendently unfastened to everyday life.) But of greater hegemonic alarm is the Shakers’ rebuff of gender roles and their being woman-headed. A distaff God figure creating a fairer, more empathetic societal alternative is enough to encourage inevitable accusations of treason and witchcraft, then worse.

Fastvold and Corbet — who together write and closely collaborate on their movies but take turns in the director’s chair — admire their subject’s rather visionary approach to devotion without being humorless about its intensely no-nonsense earnestness. A fantasy image of a red-robed and star-crowned Lee, envisioning herself as a kind of second coming, and the several interruptions of area normies pleading with the Shakers’ rowdy constituents to refrain from their incessant singing seem to be played for laughs. But those interjections don’t dissuade Fastvold and Corbet’s — as well as a more receptive viewer’s — approbation of their film’s central figure, and don’t diminish how well they nondidactically stir reminders of how little room mainstream religion continues to create for auxiliary, more inclusive forms of worship and theologically connected community. (The film notes on a title card that the once amply populated Shakers now only have two members left, though that number has since risen to a whopping three.)

Seyfried’s later–career fearlessness reaches a new apex in The Testament of Ann Lee; her on-a-dime access to her emotional reservoirs is as strong and immediate as her singing and dancing is convincingly soul-tied. (Her goggle eyes are also well-suited to a character supposedly bestowed with more clarity than most people, her sights set from a young age on godly loyalty more than any sort of child’s play.) The fervor of Seyfried and her collaborators’ work makes me not as hard on what I see as a movie that’s simultaneously audacious and hesitant to be messy — formally inspired while also a little dramatically restrictive, uninterested in unavoidable inter-Shakers tension and keeping their relationship with the outside world mostly to an offscreen minimum until things boil over. But hagiography is seldom packaged so thrillingly. 

Image credit: Cinetic