The Testament of Ann Lee

...a swooning, dizzying experience filled with song and dance meant to conjure up a kind of religious ecstasy.

The constant throughline of “The Testament of Ann Lee” is Amanda Seyfried, who lives and breathes the grace her character exudes to inspiring effect.

...a speculative, feverish, and altogether rapturous biopic about the Mancunian preacher who founded the Shakers and believed herself to be the female incarnation of Christ on Earth...

...strikingly strange portrait of radically ecstatic Shaker leader.

The free-range majesty and fine-grained, muddy-fingernailed detail of Fastvold’s film, though, is entirely its own thing: like Ann, I was left wobbly and breathless by its grandeur and nerve.

...captures how ecstatic 18th-century religious experiences felt for those inside of them, rather than how they looked from the outside.