Our Ordeal Is Worth It

Mona Fastvold’s ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ presents a musical American allegory of the Great Awakening that is ‘fundamentally carnal, even if its heroine is decidedly not.’

By Kelli WestonJanuary 6, 2026

• Film

• Philosophy & Religion

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, the latest feature from director Mona Fastvold, boasts one of the more visually bold openings of 2025. We first see them through the sun-dappled trees: an ensemble in colonial dress sweeping through the woods as if possessed, their movements alternately graceful and fragmented. Our narrator Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), beset with one milky eye, addresses the camera and ushers us into a biography of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), the charismatic founder of the Shakers, more officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, who, among other things, believed Ann to be the incarnated Christ. Almost no record of Ann’s life exists before the first Shaker testimonies emerged some 30 years after her death in 1784. Only scant documentation survives—her baptism, marriage, arrests, the death of a daughter—so that the remaining artifacts (letters, secondhand reports, oral histories) assume the venerability of scripture. She occupies a plane at once historical and mythical. Another filmmaker might have approached the material with requisite solemnity: Ann’s life was not light on tragedy. But to her credit, Fastvold shirks the confines of traditional biopics and so faithfully reproduces the essence of these accounts from Ann’s disciples that the tale of this extraordinary, unlettered evangelist borrows the dimensions of legend.

Ann Lee was born in Manchester, England, on February 29, 1736, under the sibylline sign of Pisces (and, as if to further anoint her mythos, during a leap year). Her father was a blacksmith, and the family’s modest income obliged her to work from an early age. She never received a formal education. “Her mind was taken up with the things of God,” Partington declares in voice-over, but Ann may have learned other lessons in girlhood, according to Fastvold, who dwells in this period just long enough to register the seeds of her doctrine: the sanctity of labor being one; a lasting aversion to sex, for another. Immured in such close quarters with her seven siblings and their parents, Ann (portrayed as a child and preteen by Esmee Hewett and Millie-Rose Crossley, respectively) is hopelessly privy to the mechanical, abrasive congress between the latter. For her mother, there is no pleasure in it. When she warns her husband to mind their children, sleeping not far from them, he presses his hand down over her mouth without suspending his own gratification for a second. What must strike any child as a grotesque arrangement casts a long shadow over Ann. She arrives, not unreasonably, at certain conclusions about the terminal submission awaiting her in womanhood.

No wonder she finds the Wardley Society, a flock of Quaker separatists, so attractive. With the prevailing conviction that God exists in everyone, the Quakers had long championed women’s ministry from the origins of their movement in the 1650s. Ann encounters her first model of female leadership in the eloquent preacher “Mother” Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin), co-founder, with her husband James (Scott Handy), of this peculiar new fellowship. In the Wardleys’ stylish, candlelit home, where they hold service, the congregation’s unorthodox rituals earn the suspicion of their more conservative Protestant neighbors. Due to the frenzied, though hardly undisciplined, expression of their liturgy—shrieking, moaning, pounding their chests with heaving breaths, arms skyward in trembling exaltation—this much-maligned laity had become known as the “Shaking Quakers,” or, more popularly, the Shakers. They face unrelenting persecution from the Manchester authorities, who often imprison them for disruption or disorderly conduct.

Fairly or otherwise, the musical as a genre may owe its widespread derision to the innate unnaturalness of its form, awkwardly calling attention to its own artifice (earlier this year, Sinners made its own strides in this department). But the musical’s conventions come alive here: after all, worship is already theater; we find in the church—probably the only conditions where no one questions “bursting into song”—a rare, real-world match for its generic architecture. The film’s musical set pieces thus unfold with decorous ease, drawing viewers into something like communion during these euphonious choral numbers, adapted from authentic Shaker hymns and poems. Daniel Blumberg (Cafe OTO scion, formerly a front man of the London rock bands Cajun Dance Party and Yuck) veils the film in his twinkling soundscape, embroidered with restless violin refrains, lending these sequences a hypnotic, even celestial tenor. The Shakers’ elaborate revel, choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall, benefits, too, from DP William Rexer’s opulent compositions, awash in those classical inky grays characteristic of period cinema, the camera floating dreamlike, as if part of this orchestral, kinetic dance.

Among the believers, Ann soon meets and marries Abraham (Christopher Abbott), a blacksmith like her father, if far more agreeable. At first, she ostensibly enjoys an experimental sex life with her new husband (he reads smut to her, and the couple engage in light, erotic spanking). But she suffers difficult pregnancies and all four of her children die in infancy. Ann accounts for these tragedies as “God’s judgment” for marrying, against her better instincts, no doubt exacerbated by the “unconventional” sexuality to which she briefly surrenders with Abraham. Sex and death intertwine for her, and she could be forgiven for the connection. Hers was an all too familiar despair for the time. Her denials, then—sex and later food, pillars of fleshly satisfaction—in service to her divine charge offer another unspoken reprieve: an escape from the body is also an escape from its pain.

Ann is still mourning her last child when, during a long incarceration for guiding the Shakers in three days of uninterrupted worship, she receives the first of her revelations. Refusing food and faint from malnutrition, her skin downy and lips ashen as she croons “I hunger and thirst”—not for earthly sustenance, but for “true righteousness”—Ann begins to levitate in her dusky cell. Her visions convey her to the cardinal scene of Eve and Adam’s cataclysmic consummation, a swirl of languid bodies knotted together, as if plucked from a painting. Finally, there appears a figure who resembles Ann herself: “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” From this moment, she spurns all sexual relationships and announces herself “married to Jesus.” Now crowned “Mother” Ann, she embraces an altogether different version of motherhood and shepherds the Shakers to the Americas, where they will proselytize a new gospel: strict celibacy, equality of the sexes, and community of goods. Eight others accompany her, among them her recalcitrant husband, her steadfast brother William (Lewis Pullman), Ann’s niece Nancy Lee (Viola Prettejohn), and James Whittaker (Matthew Beard)—historically speaking, her most devoted acolyte and heir apparent, who ascended to leadership after her death.

Their voyage is marked by tumult, social and environmental. The animus from the captain and crew is as treacherous as the seas, both quelled (another one of Ann’s miracles) in a stirring montage of the Shakers’ prayerful dance aboard the ship (a feat of editing from Sofía Subercaseaux). At last, they make port in 1774, the cusp of revolution. Indeed, theirs is a most American story, or at least the one America most favors of itself. Fortuitously, the Shakers’ arrival intersects with the Great Awakening, the burgeoning religious revival spilling across the Northeast. New York, it so happened, was its center, and the Shakers established their first settlement in what was then Niskayuna (Mohawk territory, now Watervliet), spanning modern-day Schenectady and Albany counties. They recruited followers in surrounding areas, and those subsequent decades, however volatile, ultimately proved prosperous for these Shakers. (At their height, the Shakers would count among their number as many as 6,000 across 18 communities that stretched from New York to the Midwest. Today, the church has dwindled to three members living in Maine.) The ambition of Fastvold’s scope begins to reveal itself, especially in the laxity of the third act, but these formative years produce some of the film’s most impressive sequences, including a whimsical scene in which the seemingly enchanted pointer finger of their patron John Hocknell (David Cale) leads William and James on a merry chase through the woods to the spot where they make their home, with the trio singing: “What eyes reveal, it’s our ideal that our ordeal is worth it.”

A curious duality emerges. The Shakers surely had a significant impact on the demonstrative and deeply public nature of worship culturally, and they were well suited in certain pronounced ways to the country’s nominal ideals. As they brave the glacial New York winters and break land, Partington recounts, “the Shakers knew that the best way to reach God was by laboring tirelessly, always striving for perfection.” Of course, Ann’s piety did not rescue her from accusations of “witchcraft.” The violence they fled found them again in the New World. She and her brother were viciously attacked by a mob only a year or so before their deaths, an assault captured in visceral detail here. The “disorder” of their display of worship—emblematic of their socialist, anti-hierarchal leanings—challenges the traditional concepts of structure (the gendered binaries, the patriarchal organization) that religion presumably evokes. There is a tragedy to their prescience: after their transatlantic voyage, another 150 years would pass before the US government guaranteed women’s suffrage. And they pay no small price for their faith. Ann’s closeted brother William, devoted to her since childhood, sacrifices romance for their beliefs; Ann loses her niece Nancy when she falls in love with Hocknell’s son, and the couple are unceremoniously expelled from the community. Abraham, too, eventually deserts the group when his sexual demands are persistently refused by Ann. Before he abandons her, he threatens to tell her followers that she is illiterate; frustration has made him cruel, but he also betrays a trace of the intimacy, the knowability, that Ann, however willingly, forfeits.

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For some 10 years now, Fastvold has worked as a unit with her partner, actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet. He co-wrote her directorial debut, The Sleepwalker (2014), and appeared as one of the four principals alongside Fastvold regular Christopher Abbott, who had introduced them. She co-authored the script for The Childhood of a Leader (2015), Corbet’s inaugural foray into directing, an early glimpse of their operatic impulses matched by a profligate indulgence in allegory. They have since written five films together, including Ann Lee and both of the subsequent features Corbet directed, Vox Lux (2018) and The Brutalist (2024). Fastvold turned to novelists Jim Shepard and Ron Hansen for her sophomore picture, the queer period romance The World to Come (2020), based on Shepard’s short story and, much like her debut, an inclement tale of two couples. (Hansen wrote the 1983 historical Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, later adapted into a 2007 film starring Casey Affleck, one of the producers and stars of The World to Come.) But the refined literary instincts that lend their movies such aesthetic sophistication can sometimes fail to translate ideologically. This was the major issue with The Brutalist: its smug satisfaction with its own poetry, all sweeping, strangling metaphors over conviction; ambiguity as a virtue.

By now the husband-and-wife duo have assembled between them a loyal troupe: actors Abbott, Stacy Martin, and Raffey Cassidy; editor Dávid Jancsó; and composer Daniel Blumberg, who makes the occasional screen cameo and scooped an Academy Award in March for scoring The Brutalist. One or two stray ventures notwithstanding—Fastvold co-wrote Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s 2019 drama The Mustang; she and Corbet tag-teamed directing episodes of the ponderous 2023 miniseries The Crowded Room, in which Seyfried plays a key role—the broad contours of their vision begin to materialize. All the films concern themselves with fascist proclivities nurtured in the shadow of the domestic. In their (sometimes heavy) hands, personal relationships often restage historical or otherwise institutional cruelties. Their projects maintain a tense fidelity to the United States, specifically New York State, and a limpid melancholy often marks their portraiture of our nation’s perverse—dare I say spiritual—disposition: juvenile, irascible, the menace of paroxysmal violence lurking everywhere. (Even the bored, mercurial boy Prescott of The Childhood of a Leader, marooned in the French countryside, is helplessly American.) Lest we reduce the Faustian Vox Lux and the gospel of Ann Lee to polar experiments, both understand that the spine of this country is religion. And that religion is capitalism. Ann’s pacific project could not hope to survive in such bloody soil.

Elsewhere, we might find certain distinctions between them. Corbet is a student of the European stylists—Carl Theodor Dreyer, Luchino Visconti, Ingmar Bergman—and nakedly emulates the formalism of bygone eras. Fastvold marshals elements visibly descended from a French impressionist tradition, and, at the risk of pesky gendered slippages, her films contain a boldly sensual vocabulary, shaped by more oneiric ambitions. She possesses an exceptional faculty for conjuring a certain tonal surrealism—all her films seem enveloped in a spectral font. After all, they are each, in their way, about the subjective storytelling of women. It is a testament to Fastvold’s editorial achievement that this film is so fundamentally carnal, even if its heroine is decidedly not. The irony, of course, is that a core sensuality clearly organizes the Shakers’ ceremonies, evocative of the sexuality they reject elsewhere. The unusual informality of these proceedings—bodies falling over each other, yearning embraces—becomes a bridge to all the disavowed spirituality that had come before and after them, revealing an inescapably human need to translate, somatically, all that is felt but unseen. Even apart from their radical, egalitarian beliefs, it is almost certainly this liberated performance of sensuality that strikes such discomfort in the surveilling eyes of the state, both in Manchester and, later, the US. But this is a theater that gets at something crucial: we come to religion (like film) through the senses.