5 Minutes
A bold Venice premiere and a daring role
Amanda Seyfried returned to the Venice Film Festival in 2025 not as a contemporary parishioner but as an 18th-century religious visionary in Mona Fastvold’s audacious The Testament of Ann Lee. The film follows Ann Lee, the Manchester-born founder of the Shakers, a utopian Christian sect famed for communal living, frenzied singing and celibacy. Fastvold — who co-wrote the film with Brady Corbet, fresh from Venice attention for The Brutalist — frames Lee’s story as something between ritual, musical performance and experimental biopic.
What makes this film hard to classify
Far from a traditional period drama or a conventional musical, The Testament of Ann Lee traffics in atmosphere, vocal textures and religious fervor. Seyfried herself calls much of her on-screen singing 'un-singing' — raw, animalistic sounds born of grief and desperation rather than tidy, melodic lines. The film sits in a growing trend of hybrid cinema that blurs documentary, musical and arthouse biopic: think of recent films that use sound design and performance to interrogate faith and charisma rather than recount chronological facts.
Performance choices: release, not polish
Seyfried revealed that to reach the right vocal register she had to 'release my shit' — a process of shedding the instinct to make everything beautiful in service of a voice that feels devotional and ravaged. Recorded in Budapest and shot with Fastvold’s intimate troupe, many vocal sequences skew toward ritual chanting and convulsive exhalations. The result is vocally daring and divisive: audiences expecting a melodic return to Mamma Mia! will find instead an immersion into prayer-like sound that functions as character psychology.
Behind the scenes: a small, committed indie world
Fastvold and Corbet’s creative partnership has become an indie filmmaking model: tightly collaborative, budget-conscious and artist-first. Seyfried describes their sets as familial — 'drink natural wine on the weekends' — and emphasizes that the film was made with commitment rather than commercial calculation. That ethos is visible on screen: production design favors utilitarian Shaker aesthetics and the camera privileges communal rituals over individual celebrity.
Accents, inspiration and surprises
Seyfried’s attempt at Ann Lee’s Mancunian accent was one of the film’s steepest climbs. She turned to British actors like Maxine Peake for tone and cultural reference; Peake, unknowingly, became a touchstone for Seyfried as she chased a regional authenticity. Other trivia: Seyfried watched an early cut on an iPad after tech issues prevented a proper screening — a small anecdote that underscores the improvisatory nature of low-budget festival filmmaking.
Comparisons and cultural context
The Testament of Ann Lee has echoes of other art-house reconstructions of religious life — from Robert Bresson’s spare spiritual dramas to Kelly Reichardt’s communal, character-driven films. It also connects to recent interest in faith-based collectives on screen, where directors interrogate charisma, gender and community (see The Power of the Dog for pastoral darkness or the TV exploration of cult figures in shows like Sharp Objects). For fans of Mona Fastvold’s earlier tone in The Brutalist, this film trades architectural psychology for vocal ritual but keeps the same insistence on atmosphere.
"Mona Fastvold remolds the biopic into a sensory exploration; Seyfried’s voice becomes the movie's central instrument," says cinema historian Elena Márquez. "It's less about accuracy than about feeling the world Ann Lee created — which is where the film's power lies."
What’s next for Seyfried and why this matters
Following Ann Lee, Seyfried is pivoting toward comedy and tentpole work, including a holiday release with Sydney Sweeney and the anarchic The Housemaid. Her willingness to oscillate between indie risk and mainstream fare demonstrates an actor shaping a versatile career — one foot in experimental cinema, one foot in popular storytelling.
Critical takeaways
The Testament of Ann Lee will polarize viewers: some will praise its formal bravery and sonic experimentation, while others will miss narrative clarity. Yet the film matters because it demonstrates how genre boundaries — musical, period drama, biopic — can be stretched to probe spiritual life and communal impulse in fresh ways.
Conclusion: A daring, uncomfortable hymn
The Testament of Ann Lee is not comfortable viewing, and it is meant to be that way. Mona Fastvold and Amanda Seyfried have crafted an experience that privileges feeling over exposition, voice over tidy melody, and communal ritual over solo stardom. For cinephiles interested in the intersections of music, faith and indie filmmaking, this film is a necessary provocation — one that invites debate about how we represent spiritual leadership and female authority on screen.
Source: variety
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