The Testament of Ann Lee: Amanda Seyfried’s hypnotic musical is not for all but it might be very for you

The Testament of Ann Lee is a weird movie.

Since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival six month ago, it’s divided audiences, ranging from love to loathing.

Perhaps that’s fitting for a film that deals with a historical figure who in her time provoked deep, abiding worship and great contempt and suspicion.

Ann Lee was born on Leap Day in 1736 in Manchester, one of eight children in an impoverished household, and would go on to found the Shaker religion (the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) in the New World, a progressive sect that espoused gender equality, pacificism, communal living, and sustainability.

Today, the Shakers, a portmanteau of Shaking Quakers, are known for their legacy of furniture design and architecture, but it’s wild to consider that it had at the head of its church a female leader, rare not just in the 18th century but still now.

She was illiterate and lost all four of her children before their first birthdays. Imprisoned and persecuted, she spoke of divine visions from God that persuaded her she was the female embodiment of Christ on Earth, and that what separated man from purity were sins of the flesh. Celibacy was a core tenet, even between married couples.

To her followers, she was known as Mother Ann, and she led them in fervent worship characterised by shaking and dancing, chanting and singing.

Portraying that display of frenzied religiosity is key to the creative success of The Testament of Ann Lee, which stars Amanda Seyfried and was directed by Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote the screenplay with partner Brady Corbet.

Technically, the film is a musical but it is nothing like a traditional Broadway-style song-and-dance spectacle. Sometimes it’s not clear when the characters are singing as if they just would in worship, and when it’s a moment of suspend-your-disbelief.

That indistinction doesn’t feel like a failing on the film’s part, it seems like a deliberate choice to further entrance the audience under Ann Lee’s spell.

These elaborately choreographed sequences are numerous and each has the potential to hypnotise – you may find yourself swaying along without realising, so taken by the movements and the sound before you.

No matter your own faith or non-faith, there is something otherworldly in the rhythms on display, as Ann Lee and her followers energetically use the full force of their body to give themselves to their God.

The music and songs by Daniel Blumberg, the instrumentation reimagined from actual 18th century Shaker hymns, has the power to mesmerise with its vocals and percussion. It actually takes some discipline to remain in your seat and not race up the aisles with your hands outstretched.

Key to that is a superb performance from Seyfried, whose Ann Lee is a complex ball of vulnerability, defiance, righteousness and stillness. She is magnificent, and incredibly persuasive in her energy, of how this woman with no education or means came to be religious leader.

Any dramatised portrayal of fervent religiosity is a hard line to walk. Perhaps it’s that Fastvold herself comes from a secular background that she is able to balance this frenzied and earnest kind-of-biopic of extreme beliefs (Ann Lee was very much about recruiting to spread the word of her own divine connection to God) in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re being proselytised to.

But, as mentioned above, it’s an unconventional film in many ways in how much time is devoted to these musical sequences and if you’re not vibing on that particular wavelength, you’re not going to vibe with the whole film.

It puts most of its eggs in that basket, and it’s probably why there are plenty of people who have found The Testament of Ann Lee emotionally and artistically off-putting.

What has been a unifying factor though is that, if nothing else, it will provoke genuine curiosity about what became of the Shakers, besides their beautifully crafted colonial-style furniture and crafts?

At the height of the movement, its adherents numbered over 5000 and lived across 19 self-sustaining communities. In August, the remaining Shaker population of the US grew to three people when Sister April Baxter joined the last sect in the American state of Maine.

Rating: 4/5

The Testament of Ann Lee is in cinemas on February 26