Like many mid-size Scottish towns, Montrose has an unlikely number of churches. Take the Church of Scotland: three churches—one in Hillside, one in Ferryden, and the famous Kirk which sets our town’s skyline and towers imperiously over the broad High Street—even so, some parishioners attend a Congregational Church as well on the first Sunday of the month. Then there’s Catholic and Scottish Episcopal and even a church which meets right here in the Playhouse on Sunday mornings (in the same room used by the poker club and for bingo nights). Meanwhile in the latest census, fifty-one percent of us checked the box marked “atheist.”
“The Testament of Ann Lee” (Searchlight Pictures), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is a history of sorts of the Shakers—the shaking version of the better-known Quakers—a religious order that arose from the poverty of people working either in the back-breaking cotton mills or “in service” in Manchester. In the mid-eighteenth century, in the years before the American Revolutionary War, a small group of believers, led by Mother Ann, chartered a ship to take them to New York; they acquired land upstate upon which they planted an unconventional religious community.
We will discover that the basic idea of their religion is a combination of sexual abstinence and public confession, or “giving all to God.” During the confessional process, the passions of the heart will outflow and the hands and voices will be raised upwards to the heavens. Much of the story, especially the points of intersection with those threatened by the Shakers, will be told in the past tense by a female narrator, played by Thomasin McKenzie, who also plays Mother Ann’a close friend.
“The local municipality had quite enough of noise-making,” the narrator says, referring to hymns and devotional verses; the filmmakers show us the local establishment dragging this group of inoffensive women by the hair and throwing them in prison. “This is what happened to Ann Lee,” the narrator says, picking up the tale. “Her earthly tabernacle was reduced until she was as weak as an infant. Once more she called mightily to God for help,” and, after a manifestation, “the whole spiritual world seemed displayed before her”; at which point the hymn “I hunger and I thirst” is sung by Ms Seyfried while lying on her back and writhing around on the ground (suggestive of the manner in which some opera directors like their female stars to perform). But in “boldly converting her suffering into evangelism” Mother Ann becomes too subversive—a woman priest who preaches about the “oppressive doctrine” of the Church of England; the “shaking and dancing that characterises their worship”; and (later) the group fails to defend the right of the English to rule its North-American colony—and needs to be brought to heel.
Mother Ann, played with courage and conviction by Amanda Seyfried, who also starred in “The Housemaid,” which I reviewed in December, marries Abraham, a fellow believer with a solidly Biblical name, played by Christopher Abbott, whose ideas about the right to do as he pleases with his wife are shocking to a twenty-first century audience; four of their children die before they reach their first birthday. This whole section of the film is excessively graphic, crassly dialogued, and involves far too much nudity; it jars with the beautiful spiritual ideas contained elsewhere, and especially with the hymn “Beautiful Treasures,” which for some reason accompanies these terrible scenes of loss. Quoting the foul language directly would be to agree that the filmmakers have to “get this out of the way,” “spell it out,” or some such. In any event, on one bleak mid-winter morning Ann is locked up “in the infirmary where she’d once worked as a cook”—she must have gone mad. The contemporary audience diagnoses abuse, loss, and depression in Ann, none of which are permitted in her world. The filmmakers then use the sanatorium to develop the powerful idea of the spiritual wilderness, and on balance they don’t overextend themselves, recognising the inherent limitation of film as a medium to show this individual experience at all. “Marriage, Ann, is not a sin,” says another nun. But Ann is traumatised by the actions of Abraham and correctly identifies the spiritual “catastrophe” that has overtaken her life. For one reason or another Abraham later travels with the group to North America. But Ann sticks to her beliefs; he “marries” another woman—without divorcing Ann or involving a priest—and continues as he pleases, even repeating his earlier language exactly.
“Ann Lee” is best thought of as a musical—a staged fiction loosely based on a story. “Legend has it…” is one way that the somewhat over-intrusive narrator orientates us; we are not watching a work of non-fiction or a biopic. If it’s a legend it may be make-belief—the story is unreliable. To continue with the musical analogy, there is a full cast of dancers and masses of extras (as well as the spoken parts and chorus). The musical to which it is closest is Les Miserables, especially in one big set-piece scene where the worshippers link arms and sing fortissimo together. The decision to use trained dancers to portray the shaking worshippers, especially just after their confessions, lends it conformity and choreography but tends to reduce the sense of spontaneity. Again, this is what a stage musical would do too.
“You must forsake marriage to the flesh,” Ann says, “or you cannot be married to the Lamb.” It’s threatening enough to the established order that they engage a ruthless mob on multiple occasions to tame the Shakers; “Mother Ann endured deep sorrow of the soul.” After one of the confessions, Ann tells the congregation that the confessor “has exteriorised her rottenness.” “Give your grief to God,” she says. Meanwhile the narrator makes a rare hopeful prediction; “The trumpet of Mother’s gospel began to sound!”
Adam Poole
28th February 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
