TIFF 2025: Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee” Dares Us to Look Away With Career-Defining Amanda Seyfried Performance

By: Myles Herod –
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In her third directorial outing, Mona Fastvold conjures a hypnotic meditation on spiritual fervour. At its centre is Amanda Seyfried, delivering a performance so raw and commanding you can’t help but sometimes look away. Long underestimated, Seyfried finally gets a role that taps into her full arsenal: voice, poise, and emotional depth as she embodies Ann Lee, a woman who believes she’s been chosen to lead a divine revolution.

Set against the backdrop of pre-revolution America, Lee is drawn into the Shaker sect, a community that worships through trembling, song, and feral movement. As her belief intensifies, she declares herself the reincarnation of Christ, and Seyfried plays this transformation with an eerie conviction that is maternal yet equally terrifying. Fastvold’s lens stays close, capturing a kind of spiritual glow that never quite resolves into clarity.

The film dances between genres: part historical drama, part surreal musical, part psychological horror. At times it evokes the dread of Robert Egger’s “The Witch”, the stylized chaos of Lars von Trier’s “Dogville, and the percussive rhythms of “Stomp”. Lewis Pullman and Christopher Abbott provide added support, the latter as a domineering husband whose twisted religiosity adds a disturbing layer.

But “The Testament of Ann Lee” is not easy to pin down. It’s ambitious and often self-indulgent. Fastvold resists tidy conclusions, instead inviting viewers to wrestle with Lee’s legacy: a radical theology compounded by a message that defies modern sensibilities. Is this spiritual transcendence or mass delusion? The film doesn’t say. It simply presents the ritual and the woman at its core and dares us to look away.