QUICK HIT: The Testament of Ann Lee [2025]

December 17, 2025

1–2 minutes

Mona Fastvold, Searchlight Pictures, The Testament of Ann Lee

Rating: R | Runtime: 137 minutes
Release Date: December 25th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Searchlight Pictures
Director(s): Mona Fastvold
Writer(s): Mona Fastvold & Brady Corbet

Give your grief to God.

Having no reference point for who the Shakers were, I truly absorbed myself into the format by which Mona Fastvold pays tribute to their leader. She provides this self-proclaimed “second coming of Christ” a Biblical testament of her own that speaks to her conviction, compassion, and piety. Led by disciple Sister Mary’s (Thomasin McKenzie) narration, we bear witness to Mother Ann Lee’s (Amanda Seyfried) stewardship through the three distinct chapters of the church’s life.

The Testament of Ann Lee finds itself constantly breaking into songs inspired by Shaker hymns and traveling through varying accounts of so-called miracles that helped secure her legend. Sometimes it’s goofy (David Cale’s fingertip being pulled by an invisible force). Sometimes horrifically tragic (the inevitable result of patriarchal zealots dismissing Lee as a witch). Sometimes keenly aware of how a series of lucky results can feel like divine intervention.

Seyfried is fantastic and McKenzie, Cale, and Lewis Pullman each shine beside her, but the film’s real strength is Fastvold’s direction. She’s conducted a technical masterclass with gorgeous cinematography and even better editing that makes good on her mission to use Lee’s “yearning for justice, transcendence, and communal grace” through therapeutic confession as a means of portraying her own artistic desire to “strive to create the impossible.”

Stay through the credits for drawings of each Shaker church and their respective peak populations (as well as the combined peak and current total as of July 2025). I see the numbers as evidence of just how intrinsically bonded hate and power is to the religious salvation promised by a major church. And just how much humans truly love sex.