Amanda Seyfried’s most significant role since Mank comes in the form of Mona Fastvold’s epic The Testament of Ann Lee, an ecstatic fable about the founding leader of the Shakers religious sect in the eighteenth century. It’s animalistic and unapologetically graphic, but at a whopping 130 minutes of runtime, its main fault is that it cannot choose between the bizarre and the traditional. Between attempts at a speculative twist on the strangest of religious customs and a historical drama by the numbers aimed at enlightening its audience on one of the first female religious leaders, The Testament of Ann Lee is neither, a hybrid that is too little of both.
Seyfried stars as Ann Lee, devout and curious at a time of Evangelical revival in the bustling Manchester city where she grew up – wed to blacksmith Abraham Standerin (Christopher Abbott), she begins to attend the meetings of an English sect founded by Jane and James Wardley (Stacy Martin and Scott Handy), who believe that the Second Coming is imminent and that God will return as a woman. Mother to four infants who have not lived past the age of one, crippled by poverty and bleakness in her life, Ann along with her brother William (Lewis Pullman) and niece Nancy (Viola Prettejohn), finds solace in the rituals of this sect, which involve aggressive chanting and the shaking that was later to give them their name. Following a series of visions in which she declares having seen Adam and Eve commit carnal sin in the Garden of Eden, Ann gradually becomes Mother Ann to the sect, a female representation of God, preaching celibacy and the pursuit of perfection. Persecuted by her homeland, she takes matters into her own hands and, with a band of loyal followers, travels to the United States to preach the word of God across the sea.
Seyfried is magnetic in the title role (despite a dip in the Mancunian accent here and there), a little bit mad around the eyes for a woman who was maddeningly attached to her convictions. The ensemble is on the whole a good one, though too many characters necessarily limits the amount of time spent on each – while Pullman is given his fair share of screentime, it is Thomasin Mackenzie as fellow worshipper Mary, whose voiceover opens and carries the film, that is dreadfully underused, a female friendship that carries no weight despite her pledges in the first ten minutes that she was to have a larger influence over Ann than even her husband. What is also staggering is the lack of regard for Ann’s illiteracy, only mentioned once during an argument with Abraham – what an interesting plot point that is cast aside without further regard. Overall, Fastvold does not seem particularly preoccupied with any historical context besides that of the Shakers themselves – the wider religious temperature, and the political, economical and social landscape are largely ignored and superseded by Ann’s bleary-eyed sermons and – albeit effective – shaking. It is here that The Testament of Ann Lee shows the most potential – Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography of the Shakers’ ritual is raw, portraying a sense of community, of collaborating on a utopian new world, one that Fastvold has likened to working on a film – paired with its runtime, in which many scenes could have, quite frankly, been noticeably shortened, this strikes a note of grandiosity, where at some point, the Shakers’ self-flagellation, even when directly threatened or attacked, becomes the audience’s. Nevertheless, overthrowing this point is the fact that that this ecstatic shaking is profoundly erotic, a testimony to the presence of sex everywhere despite Ann’s efforts to purge humanity from it. With the particular attention paid to the dance’s repetitive, pounding nature and guttural cries, Fastvold emphasises Ann’s traumatic relationship to sex, an act that left her with four deceased children and the feeling that she had been punished by God. In this way, Fastvold closes the gap between that all-impending divide between sex and religion. Ann’s shaking is more than worship – it is a release, a feeling of ecstasy she cannot attain elsewhere.
