'The Testament of Ann Lee' Review: Amanda Seyfried Gives Her All in This Visual Feast of an Historical Musical
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner - February 20, 2026
Beyond waves of critical acclaim and near-universal praise for Amanda Seyfried’s performance, I really had no idea what to expect going into The Testament of Ann Lee. I very nearly caught this in 70mm during my expedition to New York over Christmas, but the screenings were sold out, and after seeing what a singular, spellbinding experience this turned out to be, I wish I’d tried harder. This is not an easy or immediately accessible watch, and it runs long enough to be genuinely exhausting, but it never stopped being fascinating, hypnotic, and quietly overwhelming in its ambition.
At the centre of it all is Amanda Seyfried, delivering what is very likely the defining performance of her career. Her Ann Lee is simultaneously fragile and unyielding, earthly and ethereal, channelling pain, conviction, repression, and spiritual ecstasy with startling clarity. Seyfried plays her not as a saintly icon or a historical curiosity, but as a woman crushed by trauma and transformed by belief, carrying unbearable grief while radiating a strange, magnetic authority. It’s a performance built as much on stillness and restraint as it is on emotional eruption, and she commands the film so completely that it’s difficult to imagine anyone else in the role.
Visually, the film is absolutely ravishing. Shot on 35mm (As every film should be, ignore modernity and embrace tradition), it has a grainy, painterly texture that makes every frame feel detailed and cinematic, like a moving oil painting. The compositions are often austere but never cold, using natural light, earthy tones, and stark interiors to evoke both the beauty and suffocating rigidity of Shaker life. Overhead shots of communal rituals and choreographed movement are especially striking, transforming bodies in motion into abstract expressions of belief and devotion. It’s one of the most visually distinctive period films of the decade, and one that feels explicitly designed for the cinema. If it is showing on 35 or 70mm near you, it's worth going for the visuals alone.
Music and movement are just as central to the film’s identity. Daniel Blumberg’s score and adaptations of Shaker hymns are haunting, repetitive, and strangely euphoric, blending seamlessly into the film’s rhythms rather than interrupting them. Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography turns worship into something visceral and bodily, with shaking, stomping, and ritualised movement that borders on possession. These sequences are easily the film’s most transcendent moments, blurring the line between musical, prayer, and psychological release in ways that feel genuinely transportive rather than performative.
Director Mona Fastvold, working with Brady Corbet on the script, takes an impressively bold and non-traditional approach to the biopic form. This is not a cradle-to-grave historical recounting, nor does it offer tidy explanations or moral judgments. Instead, it’s an interior, experiential portrait of faith, on how it empowers, destroys, liberates, and consumes. The film presents Ann Lee and the Shakers largely on their own terms, allowing the audience to sit with both the radical beauty of their egalitarian ideals and the personal costs of such devotion. It’s refreshing to see an 18th-century religious movement depicted without smug irony or condescension, particularly one that championed gender equality, communal living, nonviolence, and racial tolerance so far ahead of its time.
The film’s greatest strengths are also the source of its biggest frustrations. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, the pacing is undeniably demanding. Rituals, persecutions, and belief systems are revisited again and again with only subtle variation, and while I found the repetition thematically purposeful, there’s no denying that it begins to feel draining. By the final stretch, I was still engaged, but undeniably worn down by the film’s refusal to ease its grip and was very much done with it by the time it ended. It’s not boring, but it is exhausting, and that will be a dealbreaker for many.
The supporting cast, unfortunately, struggles to leave much of an impression. Actors like Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie, Stacy Martin, and Christopher Abbott are all capable performers, but they’re largely underwritten here, functioning more as extensions of Ann Lee’s journey than fully realised characters in their own right. This leaves the communal dynamics feeling oddly flat at times, especially given how central collective belief is to the Shaker identity. The film leans so heavily on Seyfried’s presence that it occasionally feels unbalanced, as though the world around her exists only to orbit her intensity.
Even with those flaws, it's still a remarkable piece of filmmaking. It’s demanding, uncompromising, and uninterested in easy pleasures, but it rewards patience with moments of genuine transcendence. This is a film about faith not as doctrine, but as lived experience: ecstatic, punishing, liberating, and human. It may run too long and test endurance, but its ambition, craft, and emotional force are impossible to deny.
The Testament of Ann Lee is a spellbinding, exhausting, and singular experience anchored by a career-best performance from Amanda Seyfried, and one of the most visually and musically distinctive films of the year. An historical biopic done with a rare sense of identity, refusal to cave in to convention, and instead leaves a mark as something hard to forget.
'The Testament of Ann Lee' is out now in cinemas.
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