Formed in England in the mid-1600s, the Religious Society of Friends became known for the tremors and convulsions that would overtake its members during prayer. These “quakes” were not, they believed, handed down from on high, but emerged from the inside out—a blasphemy that saw members of the fledgling sect thrown into prison or run out of town. By the time Fleabag made it cool, I’d been attending Quaker meetings for years. On Thursday mornings, my high school’s upper grades gathered in our meetinghouse—a spartan, Italianate-style building whose wooden benches bore the etchings of a century and a half of antsy pencils and fingernails—and, for an hour, sat in near-total silence. If one was “moved to speak,” they would stand up, say their piece, and then, often a little bashfully, reclaim their seat. Being forced to put modern life on mute was, in its own way, radical, though our meetings were tremor-free.
In The Testament of Ann Lee, Shakers shake. Mona Fastvold’s film stars Amanda Seyfried as the founder of the religious movement—an offshoot of Quakerism with a heightened emphasis on self-denial, particularly denial of sex. It’s a tangle of contorting, trembling bodies, eyes and limbs cast skyward in rapture. And nearly omnipresent throughout is the soundtrack by Daniel Blumberg, who brought the rhythms of industrialization and its festering underbelly to 2024’s The Brutalist and won an Oscar for it. For Ann Lee, an arthouse musical that counts among its closest antecedents Robert Eggers’ The Witch and the Björk-starring Dancer in the Dark, Blumberg reworked and retrofitted 10 traditional Shaker hymns, and recorded Seyfried and the other actors live on set. He also led a group of nearly 100 singers to capture vocal performances inspired by the religious practice of speaking in tongues, and composed several original songs for the film. While this labor-intensive approach is thoroughly felt, it also draws the curtains on a film that yearns to let in the light.
Fastvold frames much of Ann Lee in carefully composed, painterly tableaus inspired by Caravaggio, William Hogarth, and the austere craftsmanship of the Shakers themselves. Saddled with much of the dramatic heavy lifting, the score is overbearing partly out of necessity. Pseudo-overture “The Testament of Ann Lee” introduces the Greek chorus of ululations, tuned percussion, and droning chamber strings that won’t still for most of the film’s two-hour runtime. This blend of worship music traditions from both sides of the Atlantic—the tonalities of Gregorian chant rendered in the timbres of Appalachian folk instruments—mirrors Lee’s passage from Manchester to the New World of Niskayuna, New York, but it’s too cluttered, verging on claustrophobic. The jubilant ensemble number “Worship” goes sodden in the muck, while Lewis Pullman’s solo turn on “Bow Down O Zion” gets an overblown arena-rock treatment, guitar solo and all.
For a film that treats the human voice itself as a conduit for divinity, Ann Lee rarely leaves those voices unadorned. Seyfried has been given what should be any actor’s dream—an underresearched historical figure with a bent toward mania—but she never surrenders herself to the role. Her rigorously trained Mancunian accent slips off when she sings; close your eyes, and it may as well be Sophie from Mamma Mia onscreen. Seyfried isn’t helped by Blumberg’s choice to set nearly all of the traditional hymns in minor keys. In their original forms, “O the Beautiful Treasures” and “All Is Summer” vacillate between major and minor, answer and question, faith and doubt. Stripped of that complexity, they sound like primetime TV soundtrack fodder, True Detective: Niskayuna. At the moment of Lee’s revelation, Seyfried sings a version of John S. B. Monsell’s “I Hunger and I Thirst,” but Monsell’s poetry, too (“For still the desert lies/My thirsting soul before/O living waters, rise/Within me evermore”) is radically cut down, leaving behind lines that read more like platitude or promotional copy—#IHungerAndThirst.
Ann Lee most closely approaches rapture when it quiets the noise. In one striking moment, a woman dries dishes in one of the communal houses of the Niskayuna Shaker settlement. She begins to sing to herself, her voice soon joined by another woman’s from the next room, first in the round, then in counterpoint. But then the choral synth pads swell, a bell tolls, and “I Love Mother (Pretty Mother’s Home)” reverts to the film’s baseline clangor. Compared to the reverent yet urgent contemporary hymns of Ethel Cain and Kristin Hayter (formerly of Lingua Ignota), Blumberg and Fastvold’s relationship to the form comes across as combative. In the struggle to signal their respect for tradition while chasing the sort of audacious anachronism that thrills film critics, they seem to have forgotten another core tenet of the Shakers and Quakers alike: Sometimes, silence is golden.
