The Testament of Ann Lee review: ‘an unexpected use of movement and music’ ★★★★

Writer-director Mona Fastvold is interested in how one person’s uncompromising vision ignites devotion in lesser mortals. In The Brutalist, which she co-wrote with her partner and that film’s director Brady Corbet, the case study was a fictional Jewish architect who survived the Holocaust and introduced modernist buildings to America.

This time the case study is the real-life 18th-century female Shaker evangelist Ann Lee. And once again the score for this genre-defying – what to call it – biopic historic musical is by the extraordinary composer Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for The Brutalist and might yet win another for this one.

The film follows Lee’s life in pre-Industrial Manchester and then America as the War of Independence looms. So relentless is the depiction of her suffering and stoicism, the film prompts gratitude to be living in a century of relative peace, plenty and healthcare. No punches are pulled when depicting the physical hardships of Lee’s life, particularly the agonising births and deaths of her four babies. Though her suffering may not have been unusual for the time, her response to it was.

American actress Amanda Seyfried plays the title role with palpable commitment. Her eyes burn with belief as she describes the visions that appeared to her while on hunger strike in a Manchester prison. The images of serpents and of Adam and Eve at the moment of their fall can only mean that she is God’s chosen representative on Earth. More convincingly, and with an incredible pioneering spirit, Lee preaches that because humans were made in the image of God, the messiah can be either a woman or a man, though she ruins it slightly with the edict that sex is a sin, much to the consternation of her husband, a blacksmith like her father.