Testament of Ann Lee: Opening Night of the European Film Festival 2026

Click here if you liked this article 4

https://www.europafilmfestival.com.au

Date Reviewed: 22/02/2026

Opening the fifth edition of the Europa Europa Film Festival at Hawthorn’s Lido Cinemas, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) announces itself as an act of spiritual immersion. 

The film opens in a forest humming with what feels like twinkling, almost folkloric music. Figures in bonnets move between trees, their bodies swaying as though pulled by invisible currents. These are the Shakers, and the songs we hear are drawn from their real devotional music. Immediately, Fastvold establishes movement as theology. Faith here is not spoken first; it is danced, quaked, breathed.

Fastvold’s one-eyed narrator — watchful, steady — guides us into 18th-century Manchester, where young Ann Lee first experiences visions. Fastvold layers these early scenes with painterly tableaux: heavenly imagery, close-ups of hands, faces lit like Renaissance saints. The film’s alternate subtitle, The Woman Clothed with the Sun with the Moon at her Feet, becomes literal in moments where light floods Ann’s back, rendering her both earthly and iconographic.

Ann’s early horror at her parents’ sexuality — and her subsequent punishment — forms the psychological root of her later theology. In Fastvold’s telling, celibacy is not repression but rebellion. Sexuality, tied to suffering and repeated maternal grief, becomes a wound Ann refuses to pass on. Amanda Seyfried’s performance is extraordinary here. Her Ann trembles, quakes, writhes in communal worship that is both ecstatic and unsettlingly sensual. The Shakers’ rituals — chest-pounding, synchronised breathing, bodies convulsing in rhythm — border on the erotic, a paradox the film knowingly holds. Their “quaking” feels like possession, but also like collective exorcism.

The musical sequences swell and vibrate through the cinema. At times the sound is so engulfing it nearly overpowers narration. Faith drowns out reason. The audience is not distanced; we are enveloped.

Fastvold does not shy away from the physical toll of Ann’s life. Repeated childbirth and devastating infant loss are rendered with painful intimacy. In one haunting sequence, Ann attempts to nurse a child who will not suckle, her bare breast framed not erotically but maternally. In another, she cradles her dead newborn. The humming score pulses beneath her grief. Later, imprisoned for her fervent worship, she levitates in a cold blue cell — a moment that recalls Joan of Arc in its mingling of martyrdom and mysticism.

If the first half of the film belongs to bodily torment, the second belongs to migration and transformation. The transatlantic voyage to America is staged with operatic grandeur: storms, angelic apparitions at the ship’s wheel, communal prayer beneath crashing waves. Whether divine intervention or coincidence, the scene is rendered with such conviction that disbelief feels irrelevant. Faith, the film suggests, is experiential truth.

In America, Ann’s theology radicalises. She condemns slavery upon arrival in New York and preaches gender equality — God as both male and female. Her insistence on celibacy fractures marriages, including her own. Her husband Abraham’s (Christopher Abbott) gaze upon her body — even as she pulls on stockings aboard the ship — subtly echoes John Berger’s notion that “men look and women appear.” Yet Ann refuses to be merely seen; she becomes spectacle on her own terms: prophet, Mother, leader.

Her brother William (Lewis Pullman) embodies another quiet rupture. We see him lie naked beside a man, and later cut his long hair — a gesture that feels like a severing from conventional manhood. Fastvold threads queerness gently but deliberately through the Shaker world, suggesting that their radical theology also offered refuge from rigid gender expectations.

The violence inflicted upon the Shaker community is harrowing. Buildings burn. Bodies are beaten. Ann is dragged, assaulted, called witch and Satan. The infernal reds of fire contrast brutally with earlier pastoral greens. Mary — the narrator — losing her sight becomes both literal injury and metaphor: faith requires seeing beyond sight.

And yet the film ends not in annihilation but in continuity. An aging Ann, skin weathered and luminous, returns to orchard light. Her death is staged as reunion — with lost children, with land, with song. The final choral swell, bodies moving in circular patterns like living kaleidoscopes, is profoundly moving. The community sings of “beautiful treasure,” and the theatre falls into birdsong and wind chimes.

As an opening night film, The Testament of Ann Lee feels thematically resonant for Europa Europa — a festival concerned with migration, identity, belief, and political upheaval. It is a story of exile and endurance, of radical female authority carved from suffering.

Seyfried and McKenzie anchor the film with remarkable control. McKenzie once again proves her precision with accent and restraint, while Seyfried delivers a performance that is physical, ferocious, and deeply felt.

Fastvold’s film is slow, deliberate, and unapologetically devotional. It risks sincerity in an age allergic to it. At times, its intensity borders on overwhelming, even faintly surreal — but that is its power. It does not present Ann Lee as a saint or a fraud, but as a woman whose grief reshaped theology.

Reviewed by Scarlet Thomas