December 24, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Mona Fastvold
Culture Representation: Taking place from 1742 to 1784, in England and in New York state, the musical biopic “The Testament of Ann Lee” (based on true events) features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Ann Lee becomes the leader of a controversial religious group called the Shakers, who practice celibacy and believe in gender equality, even when identifying who God is.
Culture Audience: “The Testament of Ann Lee” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star Amanda Seyfried, filmmaker Mona Fastvold, and movies about unconventional religious leaders.
“The Testament of Ann Lee,” just like its title character, is compelling but might be too weird for some people. This musical biopic of controversial religious leader Ann Lee is visually striking but often monotonous and saved by a noteworthy performance by Amanda Seyfried. Although “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a musical, the song-and-dance numbers are sometimes awkwardly placed in the story, giving the impression that this movie would’ve been better as a pure drama.
Directed by Mona Fastvold (who co-wrote “The Testament of Ann Lee” with Brady Corbet), “The Testament of Ann Lee” had its world premiere at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival and its North American premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. The movie takes place from 1742 to 1784, in England and in New York state. The movie was filmed on location at the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts.
Although “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a biography, Fastvold explains in the movie’s production notes why she wanted to make the movie a musical: “I felt there was ample room within this historical biography for big gestures, bold theatrics, and operatic scale.” To be sure, there are some memorable scenes that show the Shakers in musical and religious ecstasy. Where the movie stumbles is in the some of the dreary dialogue that tends to drag.
The movie’s song selection consists almost entirely of traditional Shaker spirituals, such as “Worship,” “Beautiful Treasures,” “I Never Did Believe,” “Hunger and Thirst,” “Today Today, ” All Is Summer,” “Row Down O Zion,” “Building and Growing,” “I Love Mother (Pretty Mother’s Home),” “Stone Prison” and “Down to the Deep.” The movie’s two original songs are “John’s Running Song” (written by Fastvold and “The Testament of Ann Lee” composer Daniel Blumberg) and awards-bait tune “Clothed by the Sun,” written by Blumberg and performed by Seyfried.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” is told in three chapters, all in chronological order. The movie has hindsight narration by Mary Partington (played by Thomasin McKenzie), a young woman who became a loyal follower of Ann. This narration, although performed well, isn’t really necessary. Some viewers might find the narration a distraction because the narration just says what is eventually shown in screen.
Mary says in the beginning of the movie’s narration that from a very young age, Ann Lee was preoccupied with religion. At 6 years old, Ann (played by Millie-Rose Crossley) is living in her hometown of Manchester, England. She becomes the second of eight children born to her unnamed parents (played by Willem van der Vegt and Maria Sand), who are poor and uneducated. In real life, Ann’s father’s name was John, and he was a blacksmith.
One night, 6-year-old Ann sees her parents having sex. She seems to instinctively know that what her parents are doing is for adults only. When she tells her father, “I know what you do to her [Ann’s mother],” her father hits Ann hard on her hands. It’s the beginning of Ann associating sex with pain, fear and sadness.
At 12 years old, Ann (played by Esmee Hewett) has no formal education but she becomes immersed in the teachings of a Quakers sect call Society of Friends because her parents are members of this group. Ann’s lifelong best friend is her brother William Lee (played by Harry Conway), who is two years younger than Ann. During her adolescent years, Ann remains serious about religion, uninterested in dating, and receptive to the idea of gender equality.
As young adults, Ann (played by Seyfried) and William (played by Lewis Pullman) remain close and are the guardians of their niece Nancy (played by Viola Prettejohn), who is the daughter of the siblings’ deceased sister. A married couple named James Wardley (played by Scott Handy) and Jane Wardley (played by Stacy Martin) are the leaders of a Society of Friends offshoot that eventually become known as Shakers because they are Quakers who shake uncontrollably and speak in tongues during religious services.
Meanwhile, even though Ann doesn’t really want to get married, she attracts romantic interest from a local blacksmith named Abraham Standerin (played by Christopher Abbott), who is eager to start a family. Ann and Abraham have a fairly quick courtship and get married. However, Ann experiences childbirth trauma when she gives birth to four babies who all die in infancy. Sensitive viewers be warned: The childbirth and death scenes are explicit.
Ann becomes more fanatical about her religion and eventually believes that celibacy is the best way to be closest to God. You can easily predict how Abraham will react to Ann’s celibacy and what it does to their marriage. Through a series of events, the Shakers begin to believe that Ann is a messiah, so she becomes the leader of the Shakers. Ann is given the nickname Mother Ann during her leadership.
Facing persecution in England, the Shakers eventually relocate to New York’s Albany County, where they live fairly separatist, self-sufficient rural lifestyles. At the Shakers’ peak, their membership was about 6,000 people. However, the movie shows how the Shakers find out the hard way that the utopian society that they strive for can never really escape hatred from religious bigots.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” tends to get repetitive with these scenarios: Shakers religious ceremonies, followed by some type of persecution from bigoted people, followed by more Shakers religious ceremonies. The movie doesn’t pass judgment on the Shakers but it also doesn’t fully examine the internal dark sides of the cult-like aspects of this group. Any religious group that believes a human leader is a divine “superhuman” with unexplained abilities and is blindly loyal to that leader is a group that is in danger of imploding or doing other harm.
Seyfried’s performance will make viewers feel many aspects of Ann’s volatile emotional journey as a religious leader, a wife, a mother, a sister, a friend and a feminist. However, because Ann is put on such a proverbial pedestal in the movie, the supporting characters seem underdeveloped in comparison. Pastor Reuben Wright (played by Tim Blake Nelson) and James Whittaker (played by Matthew Beard) become ardent Shaker allies of Ann, but their characters are a bit too generic and needed more personality. There are no bad performances in the film, but it’s very much a showcase for Seyfried, instead of being a deeply layered story of a community with an ensemble cast of fully developed characters.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” misses an opportunity to give more context to how the Shakers made people in the surrounding community feel uncomfortable because of the Shakers’ “radical” ideas of gender equality (even daring to say that God is female) and the Shakers’ religious ceremonies where people seem to become possessed by spirits that make them scream, howl and shake uncontrollably. “The Testament of Ann Lee” mainly depicts bigoted non-Shakers as weapon-carrying men who randomly show up to invade the Shakers’ property and cause hateful violence and other damage. The insidiousness of religious bigotry exists in more subtle ways, but the movie chose to show this prejudice in the most extreme ways.
Aside from skilled performances from the movie’s principal cast members, “The Testament of Ann Lee” has admirable costume design, production design and cinematography. The movie has some surrealistic elements when depicting some of Ann’s mental unraveling. “The Testament of Ann Lee” succeeds in bringing more public awareness to Ann Lee, a pioneering feminist who was ahead of her time. The movie, just like Ann Lee, gets muddled and confused about where how these ideas can work for a religion that preaches gender-equality social changes in a democracy that wants to have a separation of the church and state.
Searchlight Pictures will release “The Testament of Ann Lee” in select U.S. cinemas on December 25, 2025.