The Testament of Ann Lee

dir: Mona Fastvold

2025

What a whacky film. I’m sure you could make a thousand films about the thousands of charlatans and lunatics the States has either bred or attracted over the centuries, but this here one is about someone almost no-one would know about, and, after watching it, you could rightly wonder why you should care.

Maybe because I’m not Christian, someone in the past declaring themselves to be the Christ Reborn, the Second Coming, doesn’t really strike me as that unusual, since there have been lots of people who lied about it and another vast sub-section of humanity deluded or deranged enough to believe it to be true, and all the beatings and medication could never change their minds until the end. There was even a guy in China in the 1800s who led a rebellion resulting in millions of deaths telling everyone he was Jesus’s brother, which is only a tiny bit less implausible than saying you’re the Big Kahuna yourself.

So, even if the delusion isn’t that rare, instances where other people believe it as well also aren’t that rare either, because people, in case you haven’t noticed, are stupid. Individually, like Tommy Lee Jones’ character says in Men in Black, a person might be smart, but collectively, people are dumb, panicky animals prone to following any leader calling themselves a guru, a Jesus or a Führer.

So desperate are we to believe in something that we’ll believe anything. There are worse things to believe in than Shakerism, though, I would hazard a guess. They were pacifists, at least, though that certainly didn’t help when people came after them.

With its roots in Quakerism, this mob starting off in Manchester in the 1700s believed that this particular woman was the Second Coming of the Christ, and, honestly, they could have done worse. Amanda Seyfried is no-one’s favourite actor, like, I don’t imagine anyone has pictures of her on their folder / trapper keeper for school or on their teen wonderwall at home, but she tries her darnedest to win a golden statue for her performance in this flick. Biopic? Tick. Persecuted religious figure? Tick. Nudity? Unfortunately tick. Sexual, um, unpleasantness? Tick.

Songs? Lots of them. So many of them, and none of them are certified bangers. This flick takes what is for me an unusual route and treats the beliefs of Ann Lee and her followers with absolute seriousness, as if to say “we have no idea, maybe she was the real deal?”

I mean, I don’t know for a fact that she wasn’t the Second Coming of Christ. The ways and motivations of gods and demi-gods are not for me to know or scrutinise. To quote the legendary song by Andy Prieboy called Tomorrow Wendy:
“I told the priest, don’t count on any second coming
God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming
He had the balls to come, the gall to die, and then forgive us
No I don’t wonder why, I wonder what he thought it’d get us”

So He came down again, in the form of a woman this time, from Manchester. Manchester! And was tormented pretty much, based on this film, all of her miserable life, and died at the ripe old age of 48.

And yet… and yet… She still found some joy along the way.

These people, I have to say, seem nuts right from the start until their dying day, but at least they take some pains to explain how Ann Lee ended up as the figurehead of this cult. Growing up poor in Manchester, as a child she not only works in the cotton mills, she has to lie in a room at night surrounded by siblings but also not more than a metre away from her father plowing her mother, which looks and sounds unpleasant for all concerned.

She grows up with a deep disgust for the pleasures of the flesh, as in, sex, which is only exacerbated when she eventually gets married, and is plowed by a brute of a man (Christopher Abbot) who also tries to talk her into sadomasochistic type stuff, which makes her hate sex even more. And yet, the fruit of that congress, four births, none of the children surviving their infancy, also instils in her the deep belief that sex in whatever form with whatever participants is overwhelmingly sinful and an affront to God.

Thus, the only way people should be using their bodies, their energies, their voices, is in praise of God and all that is good in Creation. There is a lot of ecstatic singing and dancing, but not in the way that you might expect. It’s meant to look spasmodic, random, as if they’re intoxicated with the Holy Spirit or whatever, so it’s not people dancing in stately, choreographed ways.

How it will impact on you will depend greatly on your tolerance level for performances that run the gamut from interpretive dance to primary school drama class to school musical shenanigans. The performers give it all a red hot go, don’t get me wrong, but I’m struggling to even capture what it is I witnessed while watching this film.

The songs, which are non-commercial, non-musical (in the theatre genre sense), and which apparently derive from Shaker songs of the era, expressing their deep devotion to and even deeper adoration of their new Messiah and God, are odd but enjoyable. They’re not songs that tell stories or underline broader themes from the era, and their fairly repetitious, but I really enjoyed them. If they are hymns they sound more like Protestant / Anglican hymns than Catholic ones, which will probably mean nothing other than to the 5% of people with ample experience of both.

But I really enjoyed them. There’s a scene where they, the Shakers, are trying to cross the Atlantic in a boat, and things start looking pretty grim weather-wise. The crew of the vessel are sick of the many-hours-long worshipful sessions, which involve the devotees chanting and slapping their chests and exhorting the heavens; but when Ann Lee has a vision of two angel protectors guarding the mast, and everything that was going wrong gets somehow reversed, the crew decide to leave them the fuck alone, lest they incur heaven’s wrath.

You don’t mess with success.

Before we get to the colonies, Ann Lee and her devotees have to suffer a lot at the hands of whoever, the constabulary, the Anglican Church, random passers-by, before they’re convinced that the New World is the place to be where they can worship freely. Ann herself has to be incarcerated and starved for days and weeks before she can have her visions, like the visionaries, ascetics and crackpots of old. Never does she waver from her ironclad belief that she is Christ reborn. Never does she see that her commandment, that there be no funny business betwixt her worshippers, is probably what doomed her cult from the start.

Other cult leaders preach abstinence for thee, maybe, but prey on their own followers, so not for me, they cry. But she’s certain she can convince people to life her simplified life off grid growing their own food, restoring their numbers by taking in foundlings, which is a decent way to do it.

And one of her first proclamations upon arriving at New York is to condemn those partaking in the slave trade, as the great sin every Christian knew it was but did not care about for, oh, hundreds of years or so. She is also entirely opposed to war, which is not what the rebels intending to fight off the British / Royalists want to hear.

I’ve neglected to mention that throughout her trials and tribulations, she has her devoted brother William (Lewis Pullman), who proves to be something of a charismatic preacher himself, and Sister Mary (the great Thomasin Mackenzie) whose flat Northern accent and affectless line deliveries mean this performance of hers unfortunately is not going to stand out much in her filmography. There’s only so much character work you can do gazing adoringly at another character. She delivers acres and oodles of voiceover as well, and I’m not sure how much it added.

It’s hard to say overall how I feel about the film and about the central performance. I feel like I ‘liked’ the idea of this film more than the experience of watching it. The experience itself is quite unpleasant, even painful. At times I felt like I was watching people embody the idea of being completely swept up in something, an emotion, the flow of some kind of energy bigger than individuals, that feeling you get when you listen to a choir of voices or watch a dance troupe in either complete synchronisation or doings elaborate parts of a complicated whole.

At other times it felt like I was watching loony people doing crazy shit for their own amusement. This religious stuff…. It doesn’t speak to me. I feel towards this protagonist, this figure from history, what I feel for many deeply unwell people struggling with crippling mental illness (pity, sympathy), or for the people who offed themselves at Jonestown, Guyana for Jim Jones’ amusement, or the protagonist of Saint Maud (fascination mixed with repulsed horror). I get the impulses; I question the outlet.

It’s interesting, to me. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable. And there’s a brutal sequence towards the end which was far nastier and far uglier than it needed to be, in a film where there were already many scenes of brutality and horror aimed at these addlepated but harmless people. Sickening violence against women, when we already know how much they’ve suffered, as an alienating final insult to those of us that kept watching to the bitter end.

And yet maybe I’m choosing to ignore these scenes of people living and dying for their beliefs, living their beliefs, genuinely putting their lives on the line to assert that which they believe deep down. Maybe that shames me.

Very strange movie, with very strange motivations embedded within it.

7 times if I ever start telling people I’m anything other than a fallen fuck-up feel free to shoot me out of 10

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“I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst, for true righteousness” – I could go for a nice Cubano sandwich and a Corona right about now instead - The Testament of Ann Lee

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3499739929/