anywhere out of the world: No Sex, Just Dancing: God is a DJ in The Testament of Ann Lee

When the Spirit Hits the Dance Floor:

The Testament of Ann Lee

Picture the late 18th century as a slightly unhinged historical disco.

On one side of the Atlantic, the Enlightenment is packing its intellectual suitcases—reason, democracy, clever pamphlets—and sailing toward North America.

On the other side, a carnival of prophets, visionaries, sect founders, and apocalyptic enthusiasts are already warming up the stage.

Everyone is predicting the end of the world, the beginning of a new one, or both before tea.

Into this swirling theological dance floor steps Ann Lee, arriving from Manchester in 1774 like a determined spiritual DJ who absolutely insists on playing her own track.

The colonies are not yet the United States; the Founding Fathers are still polishing their wigs and, awkwardly, their slave registers.

But Ann Lee is convinced she has a direct appointment with God and has come to deliver the message personally.

Her background? A rebellious offshoot of the Quakers.

Her result? Founder and charismatic leader of the Shakers—a group whose name alone sounds like a percussion section warming up backstage.

Now, the film’s great trick is that it refuses to iron out Ann Lee’s contradictions. She’s a paradox in sturdy shoes.

On one hand: pure Puritan inheritance.

Sex? Absolutely not.

The body? Suspicious.

Doubt? Not welcome.

Democracy? Let’s say it’s not exactly her favorite playlist.

But flip the record and suddenly the Shakers are wildly progressive. Ann Lee believes God is both male and female—and that she herself is God’s second incarnation.

Naturally this leads to radical conclusions: equality between men and women, equality between Black and white believers, and pacifism in an era when patriotic enthusiasm often came with a musket.

For a moment, the 1770s look surprisingly modern.

And the leadership style? Refreshingly non-hypocritical.

Lee demands nothing from her followers she wouldn’t do herself.

Piety, in her view, lives not in pomp but in deep honesty and good craftsmanship. The Shakers, after all, built furniture so elegant and practical that interior designers are still sighing about it centuries later.

Their philosophy: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” The film repeats this line several times—until the final moment, when it lands with a perfectly bitter twinkle.

Enter Amanda Seyfried as Ann Lee: at first fragile, bruised by life, moving through the world like someone who has been repeatedly knocked sideways by fate.

But once she senses her mission, something hardens in her gaze.

Steel appears behind the eyes. This illiterate woman—who never needed to read the Bible to construct an elaborate theological architecture—marches forward with unwavering certainty, placing herself quite comfortably at the center of it.

Her early life does little to encourage earthly pleasures. Her closest male relationship is a gentle, sibling bond with her younger brother, who himself shows little enthusiasm for women.

Yet she is pushed into marriage anyway.

Her husband, helpfully, reads Thérèse philosophe—one of those Enlightenment curiosities where philosophical critique of church authority mingles enthusiastically with pornography.

He attempts to enact its BDSM fantasies with Ann.

The promised ecstasy does not arrive.

Then tragedy strikes with cruel repetition. Four children die before reaching their first birthday.

Stripped of motherhood by grief, Ann Lee transforms herself instead into something larger: the universal parent. “Mother Ann Lee,” spiritual matriarch of the Shakers, mother to an entire community.

Ironically, while she bans sex completely, Shaker worship becomes a festival of bodily expression.

Their rituals involve ecstatic dancing, shaking, shouting, babbling, singing in tongues—half prayer meeting, half spiritual aerobics class.

The unconscious bursts through the polite surface of religion.

Trauma is processed through movement, voice, rhythm.

Strangely enough, modern therapists might nod approvingly: the body remembers, and sometimes it needs to shake it out.

The film The Testament of Ann Lee wisely refuses to answer the cosmic question: does God exist?

Instead, it does something far more interesting.

It believes Ann Lee believes.

At the same time, it leaves open another possibility—that her visions are psychological storms born from unbearable grief.

When miracles appear on screen, the narrator—voiced by Thomasin McKenzie with a hypnotic, almost musical cadence—gently adds that this is simply how the legend tells it.

Which is cinema’s elegant way of saying: believe what you like.

Structurally the film behaves like a musical séance. Reality slides into dance, into chanting, into communal singing. The Shaker hymns themselves—many considered divine inspiration by their creators—carry surprising emotional power.

The film floats in a realm that is half history, half trance.

The film is something of a sibling to The Brutalist. Director Mona Fastvold and The Brutalist’s Bradley Corbet are partners both in life and art, sharing writing credits and creative DNA. Both films explore emigration as an escape from trauma, and the United States as a vast experimental laboratory where people attempt to reinvent themselves—and occasionally build utopias that collapse under their own weight.

And then, like a delicious cinematic surprise tucked into the cast list, appears the splendid British theatre actor Scott Handy as James Wardley.

For those who know his work, spotting him is like finding a secret spice in an already flavorful dish.

Handy has that rare gift: he enters a film and quietly brands it with his presence. Here he plays Wardley—a figure at once menacing, austere, and strangely comforting, like a loaf of warm bread that might also judge your soul.

Wardley is the embodiment of sexless spiritual authority, and Handy delivers him with magnificent restraint: a warm, low timber of voice that seems to hum whether he is speaking or singing, and those striking metallic blue eyes that suggest both kindness and a slightly alarming certainty that God might indeed be whispering in the room.

Every scene he inhabits gains a subtle charge.

By the time the credits roll, the film has become something else entirely: a meditation on belief, grief, charisma, and the American habit of reinventing the world from scratch.

Historically speaking, the Shakers never conquered the nation. Even at their peak in the 19th century, they numbered only about 6,000 believers. According to the film’s closing note, by the summer of 2025 there were exactly two active Shakers left.

But history, like cinema, loves a good sequel.

The number has recently risen to three.

Progress, after all, can be very quiet.