The Testament of Ann Lee, or The Woman Clothed by the Sun with the Moon Under Her Feet
by Heather Martin
Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
The Testament of Ann Lee
Written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
Directed by Mona Fastvold
2025, Searchlight Pictures
2 hours, 17 minutes | R
Streaming on Hulu
Written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, The Testament of Ann Lee is a combination historical drama, musical (!), and biopic about Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker movement. If you find this description less than promising, Fastvold, who also directed, agrees: “It still feels like a miracle to me that this one got made,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. However, the film is much more than the sum of its parts. It plays like a synergistic tone poem, letting its subject and story dictate the different narrative forms used to tell it, layering and interweaving them to not only express but experience the complexity of Ann Lee to hypnotic effect.
As a historical drama, it is built on solid research, tracing the life of Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784) from a girlhood in England to her rise as spiritual leader of the Shakers (formally the United Society of Believers in the Second Coming of Christ) and finally to the New World, where she sought the freedom to establish a utopian, communal society. Close attention to sensory period detail immerses the audience in the mid-eighteenth century, an effect achieved in part using 70mm film, which offers unmatched color saturation and enhanced detail, bringing the everyday to life.
Since the historical Ann was illiterate and left no writings of her own, her close friend Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie) narrates the film. Mary’s voiceovers are rich with love for her subject and suggest the unreliability of burnished memory, adding a folktale quality to this “Testament” as she recounts both fact and legend in the retelling. Amanda Seyfried brings the adult Ann fully into being, inhabiting her as though her whole career had been building toward this role.
We first see Seyfried’s Ann waking up in the early morning and heading to the Manchester infirmary where she works in the kitchen and spoon-feeds the patients. Shortly after comes her first encounter with the Wardley Society, which she would later lead, and her marriage to blacksmith Abraham Standerin. Ann’s experience of marriage and motherhood is told as a montage: her husband switching her before sex in imitation of scenes he read in the pornographic novel, Thérèse Philosophe, intercut with the births and deaths of her four children, all intercut with the rhythmic chest-thumping dance she learned in the ecstatic worship of the Wardley Society. Fastvold holds Ann in frame with grief and shame playing across her face, suggesting that Ann’s later revelation of sex as the root of human sin grows out of this trauma, and that the sensuality and yearning expressed in the celibate Shakers’ worship stand in for the sex they renounced.
The film’s depiction of this psychosexual current running beneath Shaker worship doesn’t fully take Ann Lee’s theology on its own terms. Like the Quakers from whom they derived, Shakers began worship by sitting quietly until moved. Movement, shouting, and “shaking” were understood to be responses to the Holy Spirit, not Eros yearning to break free. The invitation to experience the cathartic cycle of shame, confession, and repentance—while still held safely in communal bonds—and the subsequent celebratory transformation likely sustained the Shaker community in ways that a simple release of repressed sexual desire could not.
Worship is central to Ann and her community, and it rightly becomes the beating heart of the film. The filmmakers recognize that the audience must engage with the subject matter in the same way the Shakers did: affectively, sensorially, bodily. To create that experience, Fastvold, Corbet, and team created an organic musical through impressive collaboration. Celia Rowlson-Hall’s mesmerizing choreography, drawn from the trembling, dancing, shaking movements of worship that gave the Shakers their name, feels epic for both its human scale and specific detail; the actors perform it as raw, spontaneous prayer, and we feel their visceral hunger for community and for God. Fastvold captures that fervor while also showing the disruption it caused for outsiders, as worshippers would sometimes carry on all night, loud enough to be heard two miles away.
It plays like a synergistic tone poem, letting its subject and story dictate the different narrative forms used to tell it, layering and interweaving them to not only express but experience the complexity of Ann Lee to hypnotic effect.
Augustine is popularly remembered as saying that to sing is to pray twice: song here is devotion. Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg wrote the score and three original songs, adapting Shaker hymns, and incorporating bodily percussion, an electric guitar riff, and a found eighteenth-century bell. Characters sing as one expects in a musical, though it rarely feels staged; people sing as they work, pray, worship, or comfort one another. A mark of any great musical is that the music seamlessly blends with the narrative and is essential for character and story development, and this element is the strongest component of the film. The haunting score and the pulsing, fervent worship sequences invite the audience to experience what German theologian Rudolf Otto called the “holy”—a category he insisted could be known only through direct, lived experience, that can only be suggested through how it registers as feeling.
For the most part, Fastvold and Corbet’s script resists editorializing the film’s religious claims, letting them play out as part of the fabric of Ann’s testimony, though they still underscore how radical the Shakers’ commitment to equality, celibacy, pacifism, and women preachers was for its time. Two key scenes emphasize the same scripture—“a woman shall compass a man” (Jeremiah 31:22)—cited to support God as both male and female, and as the theological authority for Ann’s right to preach. The audible murmurs in response say less about the verse and more about the cultural expectations of women in eighteenth-century England, as a maternal image of God is hardly new in Judeo-Christian tradition (see, for example, Isaiah 42:14 and 66:13). What was shocking was the Shakers’ further claim that Mother Ann, as she came to be known, was Christ’s female incarnation on earth, the “woman clothed by the sun” depicted in Revelation 12. The way Ann meets her own suffering in prison makes that claim feel believable to the people around her, and through Seyfried’s intimate, vulnerable performance we can understand why.
How the Shakers worshipped brought as much suspicion and persecution as their radical theological and social ideas. Seeking the freedom to worship in their own way pushed Ann Lee and her followers to emigrate to the American colonies in 1774. There, they encountered God in the more feminine modes of song, movement, and simple labor. Throughout the film, Ann and the Shakers are contrasted over and against mainstream Protestantism, where religious authority was understood to be male, educated, and derived from cultural code and the institution of the church. Ann, an illiterate woman from a poor background, is instead given authority by her followers as she meets hardships with faith. Sex, birth, blood, death, labor, and worship are all vividly present, bringing our own modern sanitizing of these human realities into relief. Yet the film doesn’t linger there; instead, these everyday experiences ground the story even when it lifts into mystical vision and ecstatic worship. In refusing to resolve Ann into either saint or hysteric, The Testament of Ann Lee trusts its audience to sit with contradiction, much as the Shakers themselves sat in silence, waiting to be moved.
