As conventional drama, The Testament of Ann Lee lacks the familiar pleasures of tension, conflict, and a clean narrative arc. But as a meditation on an extraordinary woman and the Shakerreligious sect she founded, it is quietly compelling.  Calling it a musical is something of a marketing sleight of hand. Yes, there is singing, music, and choreographed movement, but not to advance the story. The music here functions as a ritual, communal expression rather than a narrative engine. The story is a hard sell—an 18th-century woman who emigrates to America to found a celibate religious sect is not obvious box-office bait—branding it a musical may help. And the musical sequences are its most vivid and pleasurable moments. Like a Busby Berkeley number, they mesmerize, and they illustrate how collective song and dance were central to the Shakers’ appeal.

Amanda Seyfried’s performance as Ann Lee (later Mother Ann) anchors the film and more than earns its acclaim. A true triple threat, she sings and dances with conviction, but it’s her physical, embodied acting—especially in the harrowing childbirth scenes—that lingers. Seyfried said she was drawn to the role despite her lack of religious conviction: “We are all yearning to feel a part of something, and faith really helps us to do that.”

Communal singing and movement evoke connection, purpose, and release, themes reinforced by director Mona Fastvold’s background in music videos and character-driven filmmaking. Fastvold draws striking visual parallels between Shaker worship and other spiritual or ecstatic traditions: dancers lifted above the crowd recall both Jewish wedding rituals and mosh pits; circling bodies echo Sufi whirling.

The film makes a persuasive case that dance and spirituality are deeply entwined—and demonstrates how  Shakers sought purification through movement, song, and vocalization. What feels radical, in retrospect, is how other American sects would come to associate ecstatic bodily expression not with holiness, but with sin. According to the film, Ann Lee’s theology emerges from trauma. As a child, she witnesses sex and loses her mother to childbirth; as a young wife, she endures the deaths of four infants. Her conclusion—that sex leads to suffering and celibacy to freedom—may sound extreme now, but likely resonated with many women of her time. Her insistence that God is both male and female lands her in prison, where visions convince her she is the female second coming of Christ. From there, exile is inevitable.

Ann leads a small band of followers across the Atlantic to upstate New York, where they find a Shaker community. As converts arrive, the film offers glimpses of the craftsmanship that would define the movement—streamlined furniture, woven textiles, objects shaped by simplicity and perfection. Yet even in America, Ann remains an outlier, accused of witchcraft. Her community is attacked, her village burned, her followers beaten. What her persecutors fail to grasp is that belief is not bewitchment. It is hunger – for meaning, order, and transcendence.

By 1840, decades after Ann Lee’s death, the Shakers numbered 6,000 strong. The film leaves us with an unsettling question: when ecstasy, belonging, and purpose are on offer, who needs sex?