Writers: Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
Director: Mona Fastvold
The life of Mancunian woman preacher Anne Lee who popularised the Shaker movement built on hard work and chastity is give the biopic treatment in Mona Fastvold’s new film screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025. With much to say about the expectations placed on women as wives and mothers in eighteenth-century Britain, the devotion that Lee inspired is well realised in the many well-staged scenes of praise and worship, several of which during the film’s second and third Acts becomes a musical. And capturing a sense of the certainty of faith, Amanda Seyfried’s thoughtful central performance carries the story through years of torment and hostility.
As a young worker in Manchester area frustrated by the options available, she takes her brother and niece to a local Shaker meeting – extreme methodism – where she meets her husband-to-be, Abraham. But maternal tragedies and marital discord follow as Ann’s fame as a speaker rises and she encourages her followers to adopt a chaste existence. Departing for America to establish a new, pure community, her vision leads to growing numbers but also proves hard for some to sustain.
Fastvold’s film co-written with Brady Corbet certainly depicts the strong suspicion that not only accompanied non-traditional denominations of faith but also the unusual presence of women in church leadership, here aligned in some places with lingering accusations of witchcraft that brings plenty of jeopardy as the violence of a woman’s life – in childbirth and with a flagellating husband – is placed against the brutal attack on her peaceable community. And in the firmness of Ann’s belief, Fastvold and Corbet leave room for her to inspire fanatical devotion but also disdain with absolutist beliefs in the wasted lives lived by others.
Central to this is the presentation of devotional moments, choreographed dance devices that in England look chaotic and wild, almost orgiastic in their breathy release, while in the US these become much more coordinated experiences, beautifully ordered worship in concentric circles that underpin the film’s move to musical in which these scenes act as dance numbers using chants and performance of the same lyrics. The growing adoration that Ann ignites also takes on an Evita-like profile as the reputation and possible love of ‘Mother Ann’ extends from town to village, spread by her brother William who preaches on her behalf and establishes six other settlements, although the film rather glosses over the detail and timescale of this.
Arranged as three chapters, The Testament of Ann Lee is anchored by Seyfried’s performance which largely manages the Mancunian accent, although it does veer into Liverpudlian, Irish and Scotch at times. But there is a clear line from the frustrations of industrial era living, through the disappointment of marriage and peril of lust to the calmer quality she seeks to inspire, and Seyfried holds the film through the different phases of Ann’s life, never mocking but always committed to the vision and untrammelled faith in the word and voice of God that she believes was channelled through her.
The secondary characters are less well drawn, and despite narration from Thomasin Mackenzie as Ann’s devoted fiend, she remains a background character among the men like her husband (Christopher Abbott) who cannot reroute his desires and brother William (Lewis Pullman) who proves more worthy. The film also starts to feel long at 2 hours and 15-miutes, but as a follow-up to last year’s obviously male-dominated Conclave, this focus on a female spiritual leader offers the equality Ann prayed for.
The Testament of Ann Lee is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
