“The past is a foreign country,” wrote novelist L.P. Hartley. “They do things differently there.”
Viewers might heed those words when approaching “The Testament of Ann Lee,” for director Mona Fastvold certainly has. A work of unshakable, near-pyrrhic zeal about a subject defined by the same qualities, this intimate and maximalist musical resembles little else at this year’s Venice Film Festival, or in the cinema of 2025. Fastvold fuses form with function to meet an 18th-century religious leader on her own terms, delivering a thrillingly modern incantation of an antiquated tune.
In many respects, however, the film recalls a certain American title from a decade ago. A spiritual kin to Robert Eggers’ “The Witch,” Fastvold’s latest charts the agonies and ecstasies of colonial New England in a vernacular that resists contemporary framing. Without softening the era’s cruelty, Fastvold and her co-writer Brady Corbet stop short of outright horror, focusing instead on the fervor born of fear. Such intent comes into sharper relief in the film’s full title: “The Testament of Ann Lee or the Woman Clothed with the Sun, with the Moon Under Her Feet.” Lifted from Revelation, it emphasizes redemption and renewal – while eliding the enormous red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns that strikes in the very next verse.
Or maybe they’re foreshadowing, for deprivation and repression are never far off. If anything, those very hardships – lacerating at the start and punishing to the end – form the soil from which Lee’s utopian community takes root, setting the rhythm for a young girl turned religious radical who meets darkness with a mad desire to dance.
We begin in 1750s Manchester, following a headstrong true believer as she is married off and forced to mourn four infants, each lost before their first birthday. This unfolds in a musical sequence of haunting beauty, where period hymns entwine with Daniel Blumberg’s spectral score and Amanda Seyfried’s devastating performance, signing through her grief. Fans of “Les Misérables” might glimpse the onetime Cosette remade as Fantine, grounding the film in a similar anguish that here gives way to spiritual rebirth. Indeed, for all its poverty, pre-industrial England was a land of promise — an Anabaptist gold rush for Quakers, Methodists, and all manner of quacks, each sorrowed by infant mortality and salved by the redemptive lure of the New World.
Soon enough — and almost entirely through flashes of song and dance — Ann plants her own flag, emerging from that fertile ground as leader of the Shakers. Hers is a more radical strain, preaching the expiation of sin through movement (the name, after all, derives from “Shaking Quakers”) and staging revivals like flash mobs, anywhere and everywhere, much to the dismay of public authorities. Yet the threat of incarceration proves less daunting than Ann’s uncompromising insistence on celibacy — a dictum that rankles her husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott) above all.
Though Fastvold and Corbet resist any modern psychological frameworks, the impact of maternal loss feels universal, fostering responses that could arise in any time or place. Within this historical context, adherence to dogmatic chastity becomes emancipatory, granting an illiterate, otherwise socially constrained Mancunian the authority to reshape the world on her own terms. In this social order, contemporary notions of identity hold little sway – a fact made clear when Ann’s brother and chief apostle, William (Lewis Pullman), forgoes his male lover with barely a word of commentary.
Nearly all the early apostles are given a moment of musical grace, whether back in Blighty, on the boat to the colonies, or across a field in upstate New York, where the eldest convert, Hocknell (David Cale), arrives at the site of the sect’s new utopia in a joyous (and even Disney-esque) toe-tapper. At first, Fastvold adheres just as dogmatically to conventional musical forms, but those strictures gradually loosen as Ann and her followers remake themselves in the New World. The dances, all choreographed by Celia Rowlson Hall, undergo a mirrored transformation, with the early, frenetic movements, meant to evoke the transference and sharing of pain, gradually give way to something more orderly – almost like a line dance, reflecting the growth and enshrinement of this religious order.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” is a loud film about the quiet within, almost always choosing to impress rather than entertain. Fastvold’s approach is uncompromising and unrelenting, particularly in choreographing the myriad bodily harms that Ann’s vision might provoke. The Venice audience greeted it with both walkouts and raucous applause — unsurprising, given the self-selecting nature of those who remained — likely foreshadowing its wider public reception. But I was enraptured, and many more will be as well. Though the Shakers once numbered 6,000 strong, today all but three living adherents remain. That too might change once more crash upon upon this foreign land.
Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.
