Programme Notes: The Testament of Ann Lee

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Programme Notes: The Testament of Ann Lee

by Claire Biddles - freelance music and film writer and radio host

Please note: these programme notes contain descriptions of plot and characters and are best read after watching the film.

Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee is epic in scope and scale: set across two continents, and alive with the sound of dozens of voices singing in tandem. Its subject is a figure lost to history: an 18th century religious radical who founded the Shakers Chrisian sect. After experiencing the death of four infant children alongside persecution for her staunch belief in herself as the female incarnation of Christ, Lee and a group of followers emigrated from Manchester to the English colonies in the North-East United States. There they established a religious settlement, founded on values of celibacy, self-sufficiency and gender equality. After Ann Lee’s death, the Shakers expanded to encompass several thousand followers in the mid-19th century, before almost completely dying out over the 20th century. Today, three members of the sect remain.

Ann Lee stemmed from the making of Fastvold’s 2020 film The World To Come; a queer romance set in the same area as the Shakers’ original settlement, at the time it was most populous. Although the Shakers are not part of the story, Fastvold came across a cache of their hymns while researching The World To Come. These were used as the basis for Ann Lee’s script, which as with The Brutalist, she co-wrote with her partner Brady Corbet. It’s apt that music was the catalyst for the film, as it was the catalyst for the Shakers’ devotion. In the film, as in life, Ann Lee and her followers worship through song and movement. Their bodies and vocal cords bend and pulse beyond control, as though the spirit of God is moving through them.

Early in the film, these religious ceremonies are like bacchanals, more stylistically akin to avant-garde dance or the spiritual contortions of Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018) than typical Christian worship seen on screen. The actors’ movements – choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall, who also worked on Corbet’s underrated Vox Lux (2018) – are ecstatic and instinctual, matched by animalistic hums, growls, pants and shouts. These vocalisations meld into new versions of Shaker hymns, adapted by Fastvold’s long-time collaborator Daniel Blumberg – their strong central melodies anchoring untethered instrumentation. As Ann Lee establishes her religion, gains followers and builds a settlement, both Rowlson-Hall’s choreography and Blumberg’s arrangements tighten into something more organised and streamlined, like an organic adherence to the sect’s progression.

Like his Oscar-winning score for The Brutalist, Blumberg’s score for Ann Lee is a result of not just composition but recording, collecting and collaging. Recordings of over 100 voices were pieced together into the cacophony heard in the film. The actors’ voices are joined by those of prominent improvisers (Maggie Nichols, Phil Minton, Elvin Brandhi), folk vocalists (Alan Sparhawk, Josephine Foster) and three full choirs. The effect is dizzying: even when dozens of actors are on screen, the sound is 10 times bigger than is logical, like we’re hearing the multitudinous voice of God that Ann Lee has been hearing since she was a child. The film itself has something of this miraculous amplification: Fastvold expertly wrings grandiosity from slender means – the film’s budget was a mere $10 million – causing every scene to burst with colour and life, aided by the remarkable cinematography of William Rexer and the immaculate production design of Sam Bader, who recreates both the flat griminess of Ann Lee’s childhood and the airy, utopian spaces made by the Shakers.

The casting of Amanda Seyfried as Ann Lee is a stroke of genius. One of Seyfried’s most widely known roles is as the protagonist in the Mamma Mia! films, and she’s spoken publicly about auditioning several times for the role of Glinda in Wicked (Jon M. Chu, 2024) which ultimately went to Ariana Grande – there’s something irresistibly wry about casting her in an avant-garde musical instead. Over the past decade, Seyfried has appeared in both mainstream cinema and more auteurist films like Seven Veils (Atom Egoyan, 2023) and First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017), bringing a spirit of daring to every role. As Ann Lee, her channelling of grief and liberation is entirely convincing, a refreshing counterpoint to some recent roles for female actors that revive the ‘hysterical woman’ archetype as shallow acting exercises.

Above all, Fastvold and her collaborators present this historical figure not as a cypher but as genuinely complex. The Shakers practiced gender equality, but the film is not interested in presenting Ann Lee as a modern-day feminist icon. Arriving in the US, she is horrified by slavery, yet she enforces her own rules on her followers. She breaks familial ties and organises her flock into what we would now call found families, perhaps as a response to the death of her own biological children. She emphasises closeness to God through celibacy, perhaps as a way of working through her own sex-related trauma. By the end of this remarkable film, we know Ann Lee as both a contradictory human and an unknowable deity; both the grounded melody and the strands of sound spinning wildly around it.

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