The Testament of Ann Lee

Annotation for KRRR! 2026

A musical retelling of the life of Ann Lee and her quest to create a utopian society.

Born in Manchester in 1736, the second of eight children, Ann Lee is a devout believer and obsessed with religious ideas from an early age. Later, as a young woman, she joins the religious sect of the Wardleys, who proclaim the return of Jesus Christ in female form and worship God through ecstatic dance and song. She finds her community and her husband Abraham among them, but none of their four children survive childhood. With a broken heart, she begins to preach, is imprisoned, has a revelation and becomes the leader of a sect, which she subsequently takes to America to spread the gospel there…

Although Norwegian film maker Mona Fastvold started out as an actress and, in addition to television projects, directed the feature films Sleepwalker (2014) and The World to Come (2020), she is better known as part of the screenwriting­‑directing tandem with her husband Brady Corbet. Together, they wrote her directorial debut Sleepwalker, his directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader, both co­‑wrote and directed the series Crowded Room – and both also signed the scripts for their two most recent films, the widely discussed Brutalists (2024) directed by Corbet, and The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Fastvold.

It is a conceptually ambitious project on the border between a controversial biography, a musical and a historical blockbuster, which required a significant production background with appropriate backdrops and complex musical numbers. Producer Andrew Morrison was able to raise $10 million for them, a fraction of the budget of a standard studio film, let alone a blockbuster – which required a considerable degree of creative virtuosity. For filming, they returned to Budapest, where they had filmed the similarly limited Brutalist the previous summer, although in this case they swapped creative positions.

Once again, the film is centred around a strong acting personality. Amanda Seyfried, with her performance in the lead role, was faced with the task of capturing the warmth and pain, the wildness and manic states that are hidden in the character of Ann Lee. And despite her departure from the more comedic acting roles she has become known for, she received several nominations for her performance. Daniel Blumberg then created a unique sound design, combining historical Shaker hymns with modern singing and layers of improvised voices and sounds that accompany both grand, spontaneous and hypnotic scenes of dance and worship, as well as intimate moments of loss. The film thus offers an opportunity to enter, in unexpected ways and from unexpected perspectives, lesser­‑known or downright suppressed areas of history, both religious and early American.

Lucia Banská