Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet's return to the Venice Film Festival competition line-up was always going to be eventful. Just last year, Corbet scooped the showcase's best-director prize for his more-than-three-and-a-half-hour-long epic The Brutalist, co-written with Fastvold, his partner in life and work.
That victory took the pair all the way to the Oscars, with the lushly shot, lavishly mounted period piece earning three statuettes from 10 nominations. Twelve months later, it's now Fastvold who's in the director's chair and Corbet who serves as co-author, as they unveil another compelling passion project that's guaranteed to get the Lido talking: The Testament of Ann Lee, a staggering, surreal musical charting the rise of the 18th-century religious sect the Shakers and their titular leader, as embodied by a wild-haired, convulsing Amanda Seyfried.
There are many similarities between The Testament of Ann Lee and The Brutalist. Both are historical biopics (this one based on a real person) split into grandly titled chapters. Both feature impressive, highly demanding central performances, goosebump-inducing music courtesy of Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg, and sumptuous world building. Both are far too long -- though Ann Lee is, remarkably, nearly an hour and a half shorter than The Brutalist -- and start strong before eventually losing their way in their final act. But both, with their extraordinary imagery, visceral power, and almost reckless ambition, also demand to be seen and dissected.
Our narrator this time around is a withered, one-eyed Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Eileen), as one of Ann's devoted followers, and we begin in the woods as the Shakers, dressed in their black gowns and neat white bonnets, step out from behind the trees, conjuring an atmosphere of witchiness that makes your hair stand on end. This, we realize, is the story's end point, before we're taken back to 1736, to Ann's birth.
Raised in smoky Manchester, her tiny hands toiling away in cotton mills, she's kept in line by a steely disciplinarian father. His grip on her slips only when she gets older and, now played by Seyfried, works as a cook at an infirmary. It's then that she attends, alongside her brother (Lewis Pullman), the meeting of a group that will become the Shakers, and witnesses believers making confessions and then surrendering to God with ear-splitting screams and vigorous shaking.