Mona Fastvold’s film The Testament of Ann Lee, described by the director as a “speculative retelling,” opened its fall festival run at Venice and is continuing in Toronto with Amanda Seyfried in the title role. The film reframes the founder of the Shaker movement through a musical structure that Fastvold and co-writer Brady Corbet developed after their Oscar-winning collaboration The Brutalist.
Fastvold said the musical form was an organic fit because the Shakers historically used song, dance and vigorous movement in worship. The film’s numbers draw on real 18th-century Shaker hymns and unfold in layered choreography intended to convey the movement’s efforts to purge mind and body of sin.
The film traces Ann Lee’s life from her birth on Feb. 29, 1736, in Manchester, England, through her role as the spiritual leader who established Shaker communities in the United States. Born the second of eight children, Lee grew up in cramped conditions and later recounted a visceral repulsion to sexual intimacy. She did not conform to the teachings of the Church of England and found a spiritual home in meetings led by James and Jane Wardley, itinerant preachers known as Shaking Quakers.
By 1758, Lee had embraced the Wardleys’ radical practices, including chanting and dancing as cleansing rituals, and the belief that the second coming would be female. Members of the group came to call her “Mother” and some believed Lee herself embodied that coming. On Jan. 5, 1761, she married Abraham Standarin; the marriage proved troubled, and all four of their children died in infancy.
Lee’s defining doctrinal change followed visions and sermons that emphasized celibacy as essential to purity. She later moved to eliminate marriage within the Shaker communities and rejected conventional gender roles, advocating social equality regardless of sex or race. Those beliefs and practices brought her into conflict with the Church of England, which labeled her a heretic and had her confined to an asylum. Accounts of Lee’s release vary; some contemporaneous narratives describe her addressing officials in many languages, but the reports differ in detail. What is recorded is that she was eventually freed and, with a small group of followers, set sail from Liverpool on May 19, 1774, bound for America.
In the United States, Lee and her followers established a village in Albany County, New York, at Niskayuna. The community lived under strict rules emphasizing celibacy, communal labor and spiritual perfection. Labor and craftsmanship became central to Shaker life; the sect supported itself in part by producing and selling furniture, a legacy for which the Shakers are widely remembered.
Fastvold and Corbet leaned on visual sources to fill gaps in Lee’s early life. “We looked at Caravaggios and other Old Masters for the dramatic colors, lighting and drama they contain when we needed to fill in the blanks of her story,” Fastvold said in press notes. The filmmakers organized the narrative into chapters that follow Lee’s development as a preacher and organizer, and they staged music and movement sequences to reflect how worship and work intertwined in Shaker practice.
Lee and her brother William traveled to recruit converts, a necessity for a movement that required lifelong celibacy. The Shakers’ pacifism also set them apart during the American Revolutionary War. Their refusal to take up arms led to a violent assault on the community in 1783. Lee continued to preach and organize until her death in 1784 at age 48.
The Shaker movement grew after Lee’s death, peaking in 1840 with roughly 6,000 adherents. Because celibacy meant the movement relied on conversions and adoptions rather than biological growth, numbers dwindled over the decades. Today, only one active Shaker community remains: Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine. The community had two practicing members in recent years; a third person joined the village a few weeks ago, increasing the number of practicing Shakers to three.
Critics and audiences at festivals will likely note the film’s formal choices: its division into life chapters, its reliance on period hymns for musical material, and its visual references to Baroque and religious painting. Fastvold has said she was drawn to Ann Lee’s effort to create “a society not for personal gain or money but with the intention of living inside this space where she could devote herself to work,” a theme the film emphasizes through both its narrative and its choreography.
The Testament of Ann Lee continues to screen on the festival circuit before a wider release is scheduled. The film adds to a small but growing body of contemporary cinema that revisits early American religious movements through stylized, interpretive forms rather than strictly documentary reconstructions, aiming to dramatize both personal conviction and communal practice that shaped historical movements.