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Read the reviews for The Testament of Ann Lee, the musical drama film about the Shaker Movement, led by Mamma Mia! and Les Miserables star Amanda Seyfried as Mother Ann Lee.
The Testament of Ann Lee is directed by Mona Fastvold, from a screenplay she wrote with Brady Corbet. During her rise during the eighteenth century, followers believed Ann Lee to be a female representation of God and were known for their jaunty musical worship during religious services, which is depicted in the movie. It will arrive in limited theaters on December 25, 2025.
The movie also stars Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Christopher Abbott, Tim Blake Nelson, Stacy Martin, Matthew Beard, Scott Handy, Viola Prettejohn, David Cale, and Jamie Bogyo.
The Testament of Ann Lee had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival on September 1, 2025, and was also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. For its theatrical release in December, attendees will have the chance to watch a 70mm cut in select theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times: Many movies about historical characters — especially those who might be considered eccentric or possibly delusional — stand the audience on the outside, looking in with some mixture of skepticism and curiosity. But “The Testament of Ann Lee” is relentlessly interior, unceasingly convinced of its protagonist’s trustworthiness. When she has a vision, we are with her. When she experiences pain, we shudder. When she feels joy, we feel it too. The point is not to analyze, or even to be educated, but to be swept away in her ecstasy.
Siddhant Aldhaka, IGN: A musical biopic fittingly composed of religious ballads, The Testament of Ann Lee chronicles the life of its eponymous 18th century religious leader, played with tremendous passion by Amanda Seyfried. It spans several decades and traces Ann’s travels from Manchester to New York as well as the newly-invented religious dogmas that guided her journey. It’s a film of spiritual ecstasy that lives on the edge of realism – for better and for worse – while mythologizing an oft-forgotten historical figure whose unusual beliefs about celibacy had altruistic ends, making for a particularly compelling experience.
Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press: You could say the couple, artistic and life partners, is on a roll. They together made “The Brutalist” last year,directed by Corbet and co-written with Fastvold, which won Adrien Brody an Oscar. And now, with Fastvold directing, we have “The Testament of Ann Lee” — a stirring and, yes, difficult movie that features a blazing Amanda Seyfried as the Shaker leader. It’s a performance that will knock your 18th-century socks off.
Stephanie Zacharek, Time Magazine: How much do ambition and chutzpah count in filmmaking these days? The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Mona Fastvold, is for better or worse like no other movie you’ve seen. A musical about the founder of a religious sect established in the 18th century, a woman who believed in a Utopian society, even as she espoused that the only way to earn God’s grace was to embrace celibacy? If you’re looking for a conceit that’s going to pack ’em in, that’s not it. But in a world where we’re handed predigested information every day, as if we can’t be trusted to use even a flicker of our own imagination, The Testament of Ann Lee urges us to flex whatever brain cells we’ve got left. It may amount to nothing more than a well-executed curiosity, but it also boasts one quality that plenty of mega-budget blockbusters lack: it’s never boring.
Caroline Slede, AV Club: It’s the ethos of a film that does, ultimately, find continuity in the human experience, but takes a bold, disorienting path to get there. Shot on 70mm and starring a mesmerizing Amanda Seyfried as the titular founder of the Shaker religion, The Testament Of Ann Lee captures how ecstatic 18th-century religious experiences felt for those inside of them, rather than how they looked from the outside.
Peyton Robinson, Roger Ebert: This year sees them penning yet another wide-spanning tale of ambition set against a colonial backdrop, this time with Fastvold at the helm and Amanda Seyfried as the star. “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a large-scale production, mighty in detail, and Fastvold proves herself up to the challenge of her own aspirations, tackling the weighty biography with the same sort of labor-intensive dedication characteristic of its subject.
Adam Nayman, Toronto Star: “The Testament of Ann Lee” was one of the hottest tickets at TIFF and arrives touted as an awards season contender. It’s a sweeping but idiosyncratic biopic of a self-styled messiah who was variously celebrated as a trailblazer and persecuted as a heretic.
Bilge Abiri, Vulture: Sure to go down in history as one of the strangest musicals ever made, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee tells the story of the founding leader of the Shaker faith through reimagined spirituals and hybrid dance sequences mixing traditional and modern moves. That might sound vaguely experimental and abstract, but the film is the opposite of aloof — it seeks to stir us, to immerse us in the sensibility of its distant era. Handsomely produced and shot on 70-mm., the Venice competition title lovingly re-creates its 18th-century milieu in attitude; it throws us into this world and mind-set. And the bizarre song and dance numbers, for all their anachronism, pull us in further. It’s like The VVitch meets Andrei Rublev meets Rhythm Nation.
David Ehrlich, IndieWire: Hot on the heels of “The Brutalist,” Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet have returned with another sweeping historical epic about a European iconoclast who comes to America in order to build a new kind of church. Even more excitingly, “The Testament of Ann Lee” — a speculative, feverish, and altogether rapturous biopic about the Mancunian preacher who founded the Shakers and believed herself to be the female incarnation of Christ on Earth — addresses the most glaring problem with last year’s story about the fictional architect László Tóth: It wasn’t a musical.
Zachary Barnes, The Wall Street Journal: Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, partners in life and filmmaking, are together honing a style that might be called “indie grandeur.” Mr. Corbet had considerable critical success last year with the 3 1/2-hour “The Brutalist,” co-written by Ms. Fastvold, and now she is in the director’s chair for the nearly 2 1/2-hour “The Testament of Ann Lee,” co-written by Mr. Corbet. The former is purely fictional and latter is based on a real figure, but both are historical epics on a grand scale that belies their modest budgets.
David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: You have to hand it to Mona Fastvold and her partner and longtime collaborator Brady Corbet — they never play it safe with conventional, easily digestible material. Fastvold’s ambitious third feature, The Testament of Ann Lee, is a speculative account of the life of the 18th century religious leader who founded the Shakers and was falsely accused of treason, witchcraft and whatever else the Congregationalist establishment of New England could throw at her. Amanda Seyfried holds nothing back as the title figure in a movie that, for better or worse, often seems fueled by the same hysterical intensity that characterizes the movement’s worship.
Guy Lodge, Variety: Those of us who first understood Shakerism not as a religious movement but as a mail-order furniture company — like a particularly elegant, artisanal version of Ikea — have much to learn from “The Testament of Ann Lee,” and a bit to unlearn too. Ascetic simplicity, the quality most conventionally associated with the vanishing Christian sect, is not exactly the order of the day in director Mona Fastvold‘s blazingly ambitious and busy portrait of its founding mother, which oscillates dynamically between the modes of intrepid New World epic and expressionistic musical.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: The movie looks sometimes like a Lars von Trier nightmare of ironised martyrdom, or a Robert Eggers horror film like The Witch, and then sometimes like a weird but spectacular Broadway musical melodrama, in which the shaking and shivering of the dancing faithful – ecstatically submitting to divine joy – is shaped into a choreography not unlike the musical Stomp. Atheists and rationalists in the audience might be tempted to ask … well … what is the testament of Ann Lee exactly? What is her message, her legacy for the 21st century?
Alexander Mooney, Slant Magazine: Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee is a film of many contradictions. Some may call it bonkers by sheer dint of its theater-kid commitment to theological pageantry, while others may call it boring because it sports the conventional trappings of a birth-to-death hagiography. More still may claim that it’s only nominally a musical, as the song-and-dance numbers are often few and far between, with rules that blur the boundaries between what is sung for the characters and what is sung only for the audience. Fastvold’s protean fable is, for better and for worse, all these things and more. It’s tremulous, tricky, and intrepid, much like its pious protagonist, dually vexed and spellbound by the pull and pall of all-consuming belief.
Kristy Pushko, Mashable: From this intriguing opening, The Testament to Ann Lee stretches beyond the bounds of historical drama by embracing the music and movements that define the Shaker religious practice. In that, wonder is born onscreen, reflecting their faith in a God that honors such performance as exaltation.
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