Seyfried Shines, But Quakers Fall Flat

The Testament Of Ann Lee (15, 137 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: Won't shake you up

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12A, 90mins)

Rating:

Verdict: Will shake you up 

The last film co-written by Mona Fastvold and her husband Brady Corbet was The Brutalist (2024), the bum-numbing epic about a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust to become a celebrated architect in post-war America.

Now the couple have teamed up again to bring us The Testament Of Ann Lee, another earnestly intense drama, this time set in the 18th century but also about religion, prejudice, feminism and architecture. Fair play to the Corbet-Fastvolds; they've found a heck of a niche.

Corbet directed The Brutalist but now it's Fastvold's turn, and with cinematographer William Rexer she has made a film that is, at times, truly breathtaking to look at.

Outside the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, the 1700s never looked so picturesque.

In the title role, Amanda Seyfried gives a tremendously impressive and fiercely committed performance, maintaining a credible north-of-England accent throughout.

Ann Lee was the Lancastrian leader of the Shaker movement, originally known as the 'Shaking Quakers' after the way they jerked and twitched in ecstatic celebration of the divine, and later, a trifle more long-windedly, as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming.

The film tracks Ann and her cohort of faithful followers – who believe her to be the embodiment of that second coming – from the dark satanic mills of Manchester to a settlement on the Hudson River, singing and shaking as they go, undaunted even by the mid-Atlantic swell. 

The songs are adapted from actual Shaker spirituals, though I wonder whether Ann and her brethren were quite as tuneful and gloriously choreographed as they are here, in a kind of Stephen Sondheim interpretation of their fervour.

Still, if nothing else, this picture should leave you with a greatly enhanced knowledge of the Shakers, and of Ann in particular, who made sexual abstinence a keystone of her religion... not unreasonably influenced, we are led to believe, both by the tragedy of losing four babies before they were a year old and by her husband Abraham's fondness for oral sex and sado-masochism. 

'No one can reach God while wallowing in the lust of the flesh,' she opined. If he'd been 50 per cent less lusty, maybe she'd have thought differently?

Abraham is played by Christopher Abbott and Ann's loyal brother William by Lewis Pullman, with Thomasin McKenzie as her devoted disciple Mary, who also acts as the narrator. It's all extremely well-acted and, as I say, gorgeous on the eye. 

It's also fascinating to see how the minimalist precepts of Shaker architecture and furniture developed.

But despite some liveliness towards the end when Ann is carted off and accused of witchcraft, I found it dramatically rather dreary. 

'She yearned to find purpose amidst the dullness of her lot,' says Mary of the young Ann, while she's still stuck in Manchester, and I'm afraid I felt much the same at Monday's press screening.

There was nothing dull about the twitcher and shaker celebrated in EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. Baz Luhrmann's documentary is a compelling companion piece to his terrific 2022 biopic Elvis; indeed its origins lie in the research he did for that drama.

In the Warner Brothers archives, kept in salt mines in Kansas, of all places, he and his team found 65 boxes of unseen concert footage dating from the early 1970s, Elvis's so-called Vegas years.

They have now been restored, synched with the missing sound, and the result is a thrilling reminder of what an extraordinary performer late-period Elvis still was.

The monumental kitsch of those Vegas shows sometimes feeds a tendency to disparage him as a rhinestone-suited shadow of his former self, but he really was as good as ever. It's not just his irresistible charisma but also his sheer musicality that will leave not only die-hard fans all shook up.

EPiC is more than a concert film. Luhrmann also unearthed an unheard audiotape of Elvis talking about his career, so he adds that to the mix, and we follow him both on stage and off, with Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr among those seen paying homage after a show. 'You started to rev up and you never stopped,' marvels Davis, no slouch himself in the stagecraft department.

But it's mainly about the music. A wondrous performance of Suspicious Minds ends with a drum solo that Elvis positively inhabits, quivering like a religious fundamentalist possessed by the glory of the Lord. Ann Lee, I fancy, would have approved.

Both films are in cinemas now. A longer review of EPiC ran last Saturday.

 Also showing...

Molly Russell was the 14-year-old English girl who took her own life in 2017, driven to despair by a barrage of toxic online material about self-hatred.

Molly Vs The Machines (15, 91 mins, four stars) is a powerful and timely documentary about the corrosive and sometimes fatal influence of social-media platforms set up by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who refuse to be accountable and in some cases rage against efforts to regulate them, sneering at it as censorship. Step forward, Mark Zuckerberg.

The understated but resolute hero of Marc Silver's film is Molly's father, Ian, who continues to campaign against those who think it's just fine to feed this poison to children. He often feels he's fighting a losing battle. But the more people who watch this thunderously important documentary, the more chance he has of winning it. B.V.

In cinemas on Sunday and on Channel 4 at 9pm on Thursday, March 5.