Mona Fastvold’s quasi-musical turns the illiterate, vision-plagued founder of the Shakers into a rock-star martyr—complete with Amanda Seyfried belting retooled 250-year-old hymns on a Swedish tall ship.
Ann Lee’s résumé reads like a HBO writers-room fever dream: child-bereaved blacksmith’s daughter, self-declared female Christ, jail-bird mystic, anti-marriage, anti-slavery, pro-celibacy cult leader who danced herself into trances on the frontier of 1774 America. No wonder Mona Fastvold—the Norwegian filmmaker who weaponized 19th-century prairie grief in The World to Come—heard “musical biopic” the moment she tripped over Lee’s archives in the Massachusetts Public Library.
The result, The Testament of Ann Lee, is not the dutiful cradle-to-grave portrait that usually wins Oscars. It’s a 142-minute fever hymn that fuses:
- 12 re-animated Shaker hymns (re-scored by Oscar-winner Daniel Blumberg into indie-rock crescendos)
- An unreliable narrator who keeps apologizing for gaps in the record
- A queer-coded sibling love story starring Lewis Pullman as Lee’s luxe-haired brother William
- A production war story that involved fake Atlantic storms on a 200-year-old Swedish tall ship because Fastvold couldn’t afford two boats
And yes, Amanda Seyfried—already halfway to EGOT after Mank and The Dropout—sings live, vibrato blazing, while 30 dancers spiral around her in hand-stitched Shaker costumes.
From Furniture to Folk-Pop Prophet
Fastvold admits she walked into Hancock Shaker Village expecting “chic chairs.” Instead, archivists handed her a folder of 18th-century court transcripts describing Lee’s followers “shrieking, scratching, throwing themselves to the ground” until colonial magistrates jailed them for public indecency. The director’s pulse quickened: here was a woman whose theology was performance art.
Key facts she locked down early:
- Born Manchester, 1736; illiterate; four dead children by age 30.
- 1770 prison vision: “I am the second coming—female edition.”
- 1774 crossing on the Elizabeth with eight disciples and zero dowry.
- At peak, 4,000 converts across communal villages—despite mandatory celibacy.
- Died 1784, age 48, skull fractures from repeated mob attacks.
Everything else—how the orgiastic dancing felt at 3 a.m., whether William Lee left his wife for the sect or for a shipmate—Fastvold cheerfully fictionalizes. “I’m not making a documentary; it’s fiction,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. Characters “start telling you where they wanna go,” she says. Translation: if the narrative needs a forbidden queer romance or a miracle hurricane, she writes it.
The Sound of Shaker Stockholm Syndrome
Shaker hymnals are spare—no harmony, no drums, just call-and-response melodies meant to spiral worshippers into ecstatic motion. Blumberg kept the pentatonic bones, then layered fuzz-bass and timpani until the songs feel like Hadestown covering Gregorian chant. Seyfried’s contralto was recorded on set, not ADR, so every gasp of Atlantic wind is authentic.
Three original numbers:
- “Millennial Plow” – Lee’s manifesto set to stomping 7/4 time.
- “Brother’s Hair” – William’s tender ballad about beauty sacrificed on the altar of utopia.
- “Shaking the Moon” – a percussive death rattle that morphs into communal resurrection.
All 15 tracks will ship day-and-date on Searchlight’s playlist, the first time the label has dropped a full Shaker-inspired album.
Shooting the Unshootable: One Ship, Two Continents, Zero Budget
Fastvold’s location-scout spreadsheet became a meme among indie producers: the only shootable tall ship available during summer 2025 was the 1909 Swedish bark af Chapman, permanently docked in Stockholm as a youth hostel. Cue circus:
- Crew shipped 40 period costumes, a rain tower, and 500 gallons of fake snow to Scandinavia.
- Visual-effects team stitched Stockholm dock plates to open-sea plates shot on a second, smaller vessel off the coast of Hungary.
- Actors learned to sway in unison to a metronome so the camera could counter-pan, simulating ocean roll inside a land-locked flood tank.
Final price tag: still under $18 million, a figure that would make Ron Howard blush.
Queer Coding the Celibate Utopia
Historical record shows William Lee abandoned wife and kids, grew his hair “to luxurious length,” and prized embroidered waistcoats. Fastvold reads between the lines: “Celibacy was a loophole for queer existence in 1774.” She wrote William a shipboard flirtation with a male convert that never consummates—because Shaker law forbids flesh—but lingers in glances and shared blankets during Atlantic storms.
The choice reframes the entire sect: a refuge from compulsory hetero-marriage, sealed by sacred dance parties that look suspiciously like early rave culture.
Why It Matters in 2026
Lee’s America was polarized—revolutionary mobs, fake news pamphlets, religious “fake prophets” branded national threats. Fastvold’s film drops into that climate with a dare: believe women, believe visionaries, believe the irrational if it builds a kinder world. Studios tracking early screenings report the highest under-35 test scores for a Searchlight drama since The Favourite. Translation: Gen Z is ready to stan a celibate, anti-capitalist, gender-fluid icon who sings her own gospel.
Oscar prognosticators already slot Seyfried for Best Actress; Blumberg’s score is a lock for Best Original Song (“Millennial Plow” is TikTok’s current favorite mash-up with Sabrina Carpenter). But the real win is cinematic: a micro-budget period musical that weaponizes archives, oceanic sets, and queer subtext into a zeitgeist bomb. Ann Lee finally gets the revival meeting she deserved—250 years late, one chorus away from cultural sainthood.
Stay locked to onlytrustedinfo.com for the fastest, smartest take-downs of every 2026 awards-season twist—because if you blink, another heretic gets a halo.
