"Not many actors take an interest in the audience's aftercare. When it comes to The Testament of Ann Lee, however, Amanda Seyfried is hands-on. Did you watch it with someone you could talk to? she asks, tilting her head sympathetically, then dipping her full-beam headlight eyes and giving a worried look when I admit that I saw it alone. It's nice to process it with somebody else."
"Whatever feelings the film provokes, indifference will not be among them. Heady and rapturous, this is an all-round odd duck of a movie, the sort of go-for-broke phantasmagoria an 18th-century musical biopic complete with feverish visions and levitating that was once typical of Lars von Trier or Bruno Dumont. I confess I didn't know exactly what to make of it, but I knew I had been through a singular experience."
Amanda Seyfried portrays Ann Lee, an illiterate Mancunian blacksmith's daughter who joined the Shaking Quakers in 1758, giving a fearless, fever-pitch performance. Mona Fastvold co-wrote and directed the film with Brady Corbet as co-writer; the pair previously collaborated on the Oscar-winning drama The Brutalist. The film is an 18th-century musical biopic characterized by phantasmagoric feverish visions, levitation, ecstatic shaking and soaring song. Composer Daniel Blumberg adapted real Shaker hymns and spirituals for the score. The film provokes strong reactions and encourages communal processing, with Seyfried taking a hands-on, audience-aftercare approach.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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