If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.
Ann Lee is officially getting resurrected for streaming.
Searchlight Pictures’ music-infused historical drama from Mona Fastvold is set to debut on digital platforms March 10. The film will be available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
The digital release will also include a bonus featurette, “The Testament of Ann Lee: A Special Look,” offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the making of the film. The extra includes commentary from Fastvold and Amanda Seyfried, as well as insight into the research, choreography, set design, cinematography, music and costume work that shaped the film’s austere, transportive aesthetic.
Co-written by Fastvold and Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist”), the film is a richly cinematic retelling of the life of Ann Lee, the 18th-century founder of the Shaker movement. Seyfried stars as the sect’s revered and radical leader, portraying Lee as a visionary who preached gender and social equality while attempting to build a utopian community in early America.
Inspired by Fastvold’s discovery of Shaker hymns, the film reimagines the community’s music as an emotional backbone to Lee’s story, blending ecstatic musical sequences with the agony and isolation of her mission. “There’s something about doing things — like these very, very difficult films that nobody wants until they’re made — that really spoke to me as an artist,” she told Variety during the film’s premiere at Venice Film Festival. “There’s an obsession there.”
In his review for Variety, critic Guy Lodge wrote that the film is a “robust, often stirring cradle-to-grave saga with more narrative emphasis placed on communal discord and well-being than on individual yearnings and frustrations,” adding that Seyfried is “quite dazzling as Ann the self-made icon, wielding a poised, peaceable but controlling authority on scene after scene while rarely raising her voice except in lilting song.”
Purchase/rent “Testament of Ann Lee” on Prime Video starting March 10.