The Testament of Ann Lee

Mona Fastvold has made a musical about the woman who founded the Shakers, and she has made it out of the Shakers’ own hymns. Ann Lee was a Manchester blacksmith’s daughter who came to believe she was Christ returned in a woman’s body, preached celibacy, and took a handful of followers to America in 1774. Fastvold and her co-writer Brady Corbet stage her life as a series of services: people in plain wool sing, stamp, spin and fall down, and the film stops everything else to watch them. When it is singing it is unlike most musicals we have seen. When it is talking, which is more often than it needs to be, it is a careful period drama with a narrator who does not trust us.

The worship is the reason to go. Daniel Blumberg has taken the hymns and rebuilt them for a crowd, so a tune that begins as one woman’s voice in a kitchen swells into a hall of people breathing on the same beat. The choreography is not stage dancing. It is work made into rhythm: hands shaken out as if drying, feet driven into boards, bodies turning until they drop. Sofía Subercaseaux cuts these sequences long, staying with the whole room rather than picking out faces, so we feel inside the crowd rather than in front of it. The first big number, in a Manchester meeting room, took us by the throat. We had come in doubtful and found ourselves holding our breath with the congregation, which is presumably what it felt like to be there.

Amanda Seyfried carries this. Her Ann Lee is not serene. She is tired, hoarse, often in pain, and she preaches the way someone might argue with a landlord. Seyfried sings in a plain, unshowy voice and moves like someone who has never been taught to, which is right, and when the visions come she plays them as something that happens to her body first and her mind second. It is a physical performance from a performer we had mostly seen in lighter things, and it changed our mind about her.

Around her the casting is careful. Lewis Pullman, as her brother William, is the film’s warmest presence, a big man who follows his sister because he cannot think what else to do. Christopher Abbott plays her husband Abraham Standerin as a decent man baffled by a wife who has decided, for God, that they will not share a bed again, and the film is fairer to him than we expected. Stacy Martin and Scott Handy, as Jane Wardly and James Wardley, run the small church Ann first joins. Tim Blake Nelson turns up as a pastor. Blumberg, the composer, appears on screen as a deacon, which we mention because it is the kind of detail this film enjoys.

The trouble is Thomasin McKenzie, or rather what she has been asked to do. She plays Mary Partington, a follower, and she also narrates, and the narration tells us what the pictures have already shown. A woman collapses in worship and we are told the spirit has moved her. Ann is set upon in the street and the voice explains that the town has turned against her. Every time the film risks being strange the narrator arrives to make it clear, and by the second hour we resented her. The scenes between the songs, of prison, of travel, of meetings, are shot with the same care as the services but written as connective tissue, and 137 minutes is long for connective tissue.

William Rexer lights Manchester brown and wet and America white and cold, and there is a shot of the crossing, lit from a single hatch above, that we will keep. Sam Bader’s rooms are bare and true to their period. Małgorzata Karpiuk dresses everyone in the same three colours from first scene to last.

Fastvold’s The World to Come was a quiet film about two women on a farm. This is her loud one. Most critics are warmer than we are, and one or two have found the shaking funny; we did not, though we noticed the film working hard to make sure we would not.

See it in a cinema, where the hymns fill the hall. At home the singing gets smaller and the narrator does not.