Amanda Seyfried as Shaker Leader

You have to hand it to Mona Fastvold and her partner and longtime collaborator Brady Corbet — they never play it safe with conventional, easily digestible material. Fastvold’s ambitious third feature, The Testament of Ann Lee, is a speculative account of the life of the 18th century religious leader who founded the Shakers and was falsely accused of treason, witchcraft and whatever else the Congregationalist establishment of New England could throw at her. Amanda Seyfried holds nothing back as the title figure in a movie that, for better or worse, often seems fueled by the same hysterical intensity that characterizes the movement’s worship.

Elevated by mesmerizing songs of thanks and praise adapted by composer Daniel Blumberg from traditional spirituals and animated by the whirling rapture and vigorous physical expression of Shaker prayer, in which believers surrender their bodies to the Holy Spirit, this is certainly not a movie in which I was ever bored.

The overarching impression it leaves is of a filmmaker drawn not so much to the devotional aspects of her subject as to the impassioned radicalism of Lee’s utopian ideal for a self-sustaining society, isolated from the world, in which all assets were communal.

Core beliefs, including pacifism, spiritual and physical purity, the collective expunging of sin as a kind of exorcism, social equality extending to gender and race and the nonbinary representation of God, doubtless are not all shared by Fastvold. But the filmmaker clearly identifies with the dedication of the Shakers to common goals that parallel the clarity, collaboration and discipline demanded by any creative endeavor.

What holds the film back to a degree is the disparity that creates, favoring the auteurial connection over the interpretive one. Seyfried builds a powerful force around Ann’s convictions, but there’s too little intimate knowledge of this historically significant woman to convey much beyond her zeal. The fact that she was illiterate and therefore unable to record her own experiences and beliefs means most of what is known about her comes from second-hand accounts, from both adherents and opponents.

All that proves a bit of a hurdle, making The Testament of Ann Lee a big, muscular movie thrumming with energy and spirituality but lacking the personal insight into its protagonist to justify the epic treatment.

Ann remains somewhat opaque and often more strident than persuasive in her evangelism. Everything from the choice to shoot in 70mm to the dense, front-loaded title credits treatment suggests the desire to create a companion piece of sorts to The Brutalist, which Fastvold co-wrote with Corbet. But the story doesn’t have the novelistic sweep or thematic complexity to sustain all that weight, becoming a bit of a repetitive slog at times, rather than deepening our understanding of the woman whose name is in the title.

I confess I knew relatively little about the Shakers going in, beyond the famed woodworking and furniture traditions grounded in the sect’s philosophy — designs for doors, cabinetry and other household objects had to be necessary and useful, in other words utilitarian, but if they were necessary and useful, the craftspeople were also encouraged to make them beautiful.

My other previous encounter with the movement was in the Wooster Group’s transfixing hour-long show Early Shaker Spirituals, a faithful performance interpretation of a 1976 recording of hymns and work songs. It offered the novel fascination of watching Frances McDormand — an associate member of the New York experimental theater company who returned for the 2014 production — gallop around the stage in a bonnet and housedress.

Fastvold’s film expands on such basic knowledge — though regrettably not much on the woodwork history. Regardless of its merits or failings as a cinematic experience, I appreciated the immersive access to a semi-obscure community that had a peak population in the 1840s of 6,000 but today counts just two believers, putting the movement at extinction level.

The movie is less compelling as biographical history. Narrated on and off by young acolyte Mary (Thomasin McKenzie), it chronicles Ann’s life in somewhat unimaginative fashion, starting with her childhood in Manchester, England, in the mid-1700s. She grew up experiencing heavenly visions alongside unheavenly sights like her father grinding away on top of her mother, which gave her a disgust with indulgences of the flesh.

From a young age, Ann devotes herself to God’s work but struggles to find a religion that aligns with her beliefs, until she happens to attend a revivalist meeting in the home of Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin), who leads the session of purging and praise, and her husband James (Scott Handy).

The wild, almost convulsive stomping and shaking as sins are absolved appeals to Ann’s fervid nature — the movement’s eventual name evolved from their original description, “Shaking Quakers.” But she’s perhaps even more captivated by the group’s belief in the promise of a second coming in the form of a woman: “God created us all in his image, so he must be both man and woman.”

She marries handsome young blacksmith Abraham (Christopher Abbott) and complies with his brusque sexual demands for a time — lots of bare-assed birch branch lashings and “Take me in your mouth” orders, which she declines — until the last of four babies that die in their infancy is gone, leaving Ann near death. She believes the tragedies that have befallen her are the result of Abraham and her father convincing her to marry and submit to the sin of sex.

Converting her suffering into evangelism, she starts preaching that fornication is the curse separating man from God. After three days of boisterous worship, noise complaints prompt municipality officials to have Ann dragged out and tossed into a prison cell, where Fastvold and Corbet’s script takes perhaps its most extravagant license. I get the levitation, but the sudden covering of soft, downy white fur? Mercifully it comes off but only increases Ann’s thirst for true righteousness.

The most involving section begins after Ann and others start believing she is the second coming, calling her “Mother.” Accompanied by a small group that includes her loving brother William (Lewis Pullman) — who tames his own taboo sexual proclivities to get with the celibacy program — they cross the Atlantic.

The detailed construction of the 18th century ship is impressive, as are all the physical set builds, most of them done at the same studios in Hungary where The Brutalist was made. Fastvold and Corbet clearly have figured out how to get bang for their buck on large-scale period films that would be exponentially costlier as studio productions.

The arrival in America requires adjustments, and there’s some disharmony within the group, notably when Abe puts his foot down after six years of abstinence and demands what he considers his conjugal rights. But the shift in location that follows has a lovely Thoreauvian quality as Ann and her group set out into nature in search of isolation and transcendence. One of the members, John Hocknell (musician, playwright and stage performer David Cale), buys a piece of land on which to build and start a farm.

The period that follows includes successes, in terms of expanding the flock, and setbacks, usually stemming from word getting out to people instantly threatened by any belief that veers from their own. The drama builds with its share of distressing scenes to a violent climax as attacks against the peaceful community intensify.

I wish I could say I found the arc of Ann’s life more affecting, but there’s a stodgy quality to the narrative only partly ameliorated by the rhapsodic beauty of the songs (even that can wear a bit thin) and the chiming notes of Blumberg’s score, which effectively introduces non-period electronic elements. That said, Seyfried, McKenzie, Pullman and Abbott all make strong impressions and are clearly in sync with the director’s vision.

Ultimately, Fastvold commands admiration for mounting a project clearly conceived with few commercial concerns. Without pushing the point in any obvious way, she suggests contemporary parallels with the Shakers’ desire for equality across the entire spectrum of civil and religious rights and their rejection of any form of tyrannical rule. The filmmaker also deserves credit for making something that could not be called a faith-based movie and yet treats the religious beliefs of its subjects with profound respect.