Start the week with a film: Amanda Seyfried is a mesmerising messiah in ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’

Amanda Seyfried delivered two of 2025’s most compelling performances. One of them is on the lengthy and perennially growing list of “Biggest Oscar Snubs”.

Seyfried was deadly in the thriller The Housemaid, overshadowing co-star Sydney Sweeney (no mean task). And The Testament of Ann Lee is unimaginable without Seyfried. The latter movie earned Seyfried nominations at the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice awards, but the Oscars were not swayed.

Perhaps it had something to do with the inherent strangeness of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, about the founder of the millenarian Christian sect called the Shakers. The Oscars usually prefer films that give the appearance of complexity while actually being simple to follow and easy to relate to. The Testament of Ann Lee, which is out on JioHotstar, isn’t that kind of movie.

Co-written by Fastvold and her partner Brady Corbet (they also collaborated on Corbet’s The Brutalist in 2024), the period biopic explores the intense religiosity that led to Ann Lee setting up the Shakers. In eighteenth-century England, Ann (Seyfried) and her brother William (Lewis Pullman) are initially followers of the Quaker sect. Ann is an enthusiastic participant in the ecstatic chest-beating, singing and dancing, called shaking.Read more