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Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet’s return to the Venice Film Festival competition line-up was always going to be eventful. Just last year, Corbet scooped the showcase’s best-director prize for his more-than-three-and-a-half-hour-long epic The Brutalist, co-written with Fastvold, his partner in life and work.
That victory took the pair all the way to the Oscars, with the lushly shot, lavishly mounted period piece earning three statuettes from 10 nominations. Twelve months later, it’s now Fastvold who’s in the director’s chair and Corbet who serves as co-author, as they unveil another compelling passion project that’s guaranteed to get the Lido talking: The Testament of Ann Lee, a staggering, surreal musical charting the rise of the 18th-century religious sect the Shakers and their titular leader, as embodied by a wild-haired, convulsing Amanda Seyfried.
There are many similarities between The Testament of Ann Lee and The Brutalist. Both are historical biopics (this one based on a real person) split into grandly titled chapters. Both feature impressive, highly demanding central performances, goosebump-inducing music courtesy of Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg, and sumptuous world building. Both are far too long—though Ann Lee is, remarkably, nearly an hour and a half shorter than The Brutalist—and start strong before eventually losing their way in their final act. But both, with their extraordinary imagery, visceral power, and almost reckless ambition, also demand to be seen and dissected.
Our narrator this time around is a withered, one-eyed Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Eileen), as one of Ann’s devoted followers, and we begin in the woods as the Shakers, dressed in their black gowns and neat white bonnets, step out from behind the trees, conjuring an atmosphere of witchiness that makes your hair stand on end. This, we realize, is the story’s end point, before we’re taken back to 1736, to Ann’s birth.
Raised in smoky Manchester, her tiny hands toiling away in cotton mills, she’s kept in line by a steely disciplinarian father. His grip on her slips only when she gets older and, now played by Seyfried, works as a cook at an infirmary. It’s then that she attends, alongside her brother (Lewis Pullman), the meeting of a group that will become the Shakers, and witnesses believers making confessions and then surrendering to God with ear-splitting screams and vigorous shaking.
This becomes Ann’s new family, and the dance sequences that follow are truly transcendent. Seyfried and her co-stars commit, body and soul, moving with a kind of possessed single-mindedness, ferocity, and abandon that seems to reach out of the screen, grab you by the scruff of your neck, and drag you along with them.
The music, too, is magical. For those allergic to the genre, let me clarify that this is not quite a sung-through musical, but rather a film with songs, and these tunes are, broadly, folksy, stilted, and haunting—traditional Shaker spirituals expertly reimagined by Blumberg. (Keep your eyes peeled for an extended cameo from the composer later on, as well.) One or two of the hymns, as sung by the angelic Seyfried, feel a little Disney-fied, certainly (some may get Mamma Mia!-slash-Les Misérables flashbacks), but these head-spinning set pieces are also, by and large, the movie’s strongest moments.
Soon, Ann meets her future husband, a tough-as-nails blacksmith (a brooding Christopher Abbott), just like her father, with whom she gives birth to a string of children. It all ends in heartbreak, and the montage that summarizes this chapter of her life is brutally economical, an excruciating and tonally masterful rollercoaster of false promise and unbelievable suffering. It lands Ann at her lowest point—but her faith eventually lifts her out of it, and she achieves a sort of sainthood.
This first hour flies by; the same is not true of the second. Ann and her acolytes journey to America to find more followers—a portion of the tale that feels more adrift but then finds its footing, largely thanks to another musical interlude. But once they reach the New World, what began as a breathless sprint turns into a bit of a slog.
Interesting questions are raised regarding Ann’s continued illiteracy, defections among her friends and family, and accusations of treason, given that she’s a British transplant spreading her own gospel at a time when the nation is fighting the colonial oppression of King George III. But The Testament of Ann Lee can’t seem to decide what to focus on. Instead, it falls into a by-the-numbers recounting of Ann’s story until we reach a confoundingly anti-climactic conclusion. What is this film trying to say, about Ann, this sect, and this moment in history? I have no idea, and I’m not fully convinced that Fastvold and Corbet know, either.
It doesn’t help that this final third is lighter on the music—save for a mesmeric last dance—which gives us more time and space to observe the film’s flaws. Among them, unfortunately, are a number of questionable and distracting Mancunian accents from a cast which is, er, mostly not from Manchester—intonations that will likely go unnoticed by American ears, but may be unbearable to some British ones. Coupled with some slapstick scenes and a recurring motif of Renaissance paintings coming to life, it gives The Testament of Ann Lee a SNL sketch-like quality that sometimes jars with its own self-seriousness.
This is a film that will surely divide audiences, and it’ll be fascinating to see how awards bodies respond to it. The Brutalist, for all its idiosyncrasies, was a fairly conventional Oscar player—a classically structured paean to a great man. This, on the other hand, is a stranger and more difficult proposition, with its experiments in magical realism, unsettling dances, and centering of cultish women. Still, its music, cinematography, costumes, and production design all deserve attention, as does Seyfried, who has always been excellent, but here finally gets a big-screen leading role worthy of her talent.
Whatever happens, The Testament of Ann Lee is a release that should at least liven up the 2026 awards race and generate endless discourse—which, naturally, makes it essential viewing for any cinephile worth their salt.
