The awards-season tide has already found Amanda Seyfried for “The Testament of Ann Lee,” with the performance earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. And it’s an oh-so-worthy performance in a dazzlingly original film.
Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written with Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist,” “Vox Lux”), the film is a historical musical drama centered on Ann Lee, the eighteenth-century spiritual leader who helped found the Shakers—an American-born sect shaped by communal living, celibacy, and a radical vision of equality. With the official trailer now out, as the film continues its limited theatrical run, the pitch is less “stately biopic” and more full-bodied spiritual fever dream.
That intensity is ultimately carried on Seyfried’s shoulders, and our Venice review made the case in plain terms: “The constant throughline of ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ is Amanda Seyfried, who lives and breathes the grace her character exudes to inspiring effect.” It’s a towering, brave centerpiece—precisely the kind of performance that can keep an ambitious film aloft even when it’s swinging for the rafters.
And it is, by design, a big swing for the fences: a musical that draws on Shaker hymns and ecstatic worship to create its own language of movement and sound. Fastvold’s approach—working with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall—leans into the idea of devotion as embodied practice, with the film treating worship as exertion and release.
That’s where Daniel Blumberg’s haunting score comes in. Fresh off his Oscar win for his score for “The Brutalist,” Blumberg’s work here has been positioned as a crucial engine—composed from Shaker hymn sources and paired with original material written for the film. Our review highlighted how the movie continually teeters on the boundary between worship-as-song and musical-as-story, with Blumberg’s compositions shifting gears as the Shakers’ journey unfolds across the Atlantic. Many of these songs are heartbreakingly gorgeous with a deep yearning for meaning in a world that makes no sense.
The ensemble around Seyfried includes Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, and Christopher Abbott, as Fastvold stages a devotional community that’s both utopian in aspiration and punishing in practice. Searchlight Pictures is handling distribution, with the film in limited theatrical release following its festival run.
If the Golden Globes nomination is the first big flag planted, the hope is the conversation keeps expanding—because this is the kind of deeply ambitious, craft-forward film that deserves to be recognized across the board, not just for a single performance (even when that performance is doing something this bold). Watch the official trailer below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2007. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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