The Testament of Ann Lee is a bonkers musical fantasia about an obscure religious sect. Its star and writer-director Mona Fastvold talk fear, bonding – and not needing an Oscar
N
ot many actors take an interest in the audience’s aftercare. When it comes to The Testament of Ann Lee, however, Amanda Seyfried is hands-on. “Did you watch it with someone you could talk to?” she asks, tilting her head sympathetically, then dipping her full-beam headlight eyes and giving a worried look when I admit that I saw it alone. “It’s nice to process it with somebody else.”
Her concern is understandable. Whatever feelings the film provokes, indifference will not be among them. Heady and rapturous, this is an all-round odd duck of a movie, the sort of go-for-broke phantasmagoria – an 18th-century musical biopic complete with feverish visions and levitating – that was once typical of Lars von Trier or Bruno Dumont. I confess I didn’t know exactly what to make of it, but I knew I had been through a singular experience. Its director, Mona Fastvold, seated beside Seyfried on a sofa in a London hotel room, looks delighted. “That’s my favourite sort of feeling,” she says.
Fastvold co-wrote the screenplay with her partner, Brady Corbet; their previous collaborations include last year’s Oscar-winning drama The Brutalist, which Corbet directed. (The couple also perform second-unit directing duties on one another’s movies.) Like that film, The Testament of Ann Lee is an immigrant story, though in this case a factual one. Seyfried gives a fearless, fever-pitch performance as Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Mancunian blacksmith, who in 1758 fell in with the Shaking Quakers, a religious group so-called because of the ecstatically shaking, trembling dances by which adherents responded to the infusion of God’s spirit. This was accompanied by soaring song and panted, rhythmic incantations; for the film, the British composer Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for his score for The Brutalist, has rousingly adapted real Shaker hymns and spirituals.
