The Zealous Voyagers of “Magellan” and “The Testament of Ann Lee”

Where does such a charge leave Magellan, despoiler of every Eden he encounters? The film, to its credit, does not skimp on paradisiacal visions. Every shot of the tropics is a painterly study in lush foliage and golden-pink sunlight; the beauty of the natural world seems, if anything, magnified by Magellan’s encroaching, annihilating threat. Such visual wonders will hardly surprise admirers of Diaz, whose work has encouraged contemplation, and at marathon lengths. His “Evolution of a Filipino Family” (2004) clocks in at nearly eleven hours, and he has spoken of a nine-hour cut of “Magellan,” which purportedly gives a fuller account of the explorer’s briefly seen wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo). Presumably, it would dive even deeper into the conflicted soul of Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), an enslaved man who serves as Magellan’s interpreter, and who, in this telling, plays a role in his master’s ignominious defeat, in 1521.

By Diaz’s standards, this abridged version is fairly smooth sailing. It has a movie star at the helm, after all, and runs a mere two hours and forty-three minutes. Truthfully, it doesn’t run so much as flow, with hypnotic grace and a grim, sorrowful momentum, but it does build to a properly cacklesome finish, not long after Magellan’s men attempt to force their Christianity on the Philippine island of Cebu, where the Indigenous would-be converts respond with force of their own. You’d think the leader of the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe would know that what goes around comes around.

What are we to make of the season bringing us not one but two artful bio-pics, each centered on a boldly ambitious, stubbornly deluded visionary who sets out across the sea, bent on converting the masses to Christ? I’m not sure, but Ann Lee, the British-born evangelist who sailed to America in 1774 and led the Christian sect known as the Shakers, would scoff at the idea of coincidence. In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a mesmerizing oddity from the director Mona Fastvold (“The World to Come,” from 2021), Amanda Seyfried proselytizes up a storm as Mother Ann, as Lee is known to her coterie of faithful followers in eighteenth-century Manchester. Bent on experiencing a radical depth of intimacy with God, Ann leads her disciples in extended, highly expressive sessions of musical worship: again and again, the Shakers close their eyes, hurl their arms heavenward, and transfigure their ecstasy into song. “All is concert / all is summer,” they croon, in the most fervently incantatory of their numbers.

Fastvold takes the “all is concert” part quite literally. The women may wear bonnets and Pilgrim-esque collars, but “The Testament of Ann Lee” is stylized in ways that go beyond the traditional cinematic grammar of the period piece; it’s a full-bore musical extravaganza. The Shaker hymnal, in the hands of the composer Daniel Blumberg, becomes a maddeningly infectious soundtrack. The cinematographer William Rexer follows the actors through dance formations that are choreographed with stately simplicity but executed with a furious, stomping athleticism; the lilting repetitions of the music are matched by chest slaps and footfalls. Crossing the sea to New York, Ann and her flock aim to worship without ceasing, even—or especially—when the ship is tossed about in a violent tempest. Jesus calmed the waters with a simple “Quiet! Be still”; the Shakers kick up such a holy ruckus that some members of the crew are tempted to chuck them overboard.

How reasonable you find this temptation may determine the limits of your own tolerance for “The Testament of Ann Lee.” I confess that I was held so spellbound by Fastvold’s musical flights of fancy—and by the attendant sweep and muscularity of her filmmaking—that I felt let down by the more prosaic moments, when everyone doesn’t erupt into song and dance. The music tells the story: amid such relentless melodic heaves and percussive thrusts, you needn’t listen too closely to detect a whisper of sublimated eroticism. That’s fitting, for the Shakers preach a doctrine of strict celibacy—one that Ann attributes to a God-given vision, although the movie traces it back to her cramped and impoverished Manchester childhood, during which she’s repulsed by the sight of her father pawing at her mother. Ann’s sexual disgust deepens years later, when, still in England, she marries a lusty blacksmith, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), and births four children, none of whom survives infancy—a tragedy that she sees as divine punishment for fornication. By the time the couple land in New York, Ann has renounced the gratifications of the flesh, and, eventually, Abraham abandons the marriage. Ann’s closer companion is her adoring brother, William (Lewis Pullman), who obeys her without question—even forsaking his male lover, in a glancing subplot, to pursue the Shaker way.

This is the latest picture that Fastvold has co-written with her partner, the director Brady Corbet; they also worked together on his films “The Childhood of a Leader” (2016), “Vox Lux” (2018), and “The Brutalist” (2024), a fictional portrait of a postwar Hungarian American architect which felt richer and truer in its detailing than do most bio-pics. “The Testament of Ann Lee,” by contrast, is a bio-pic that feels contorted into fiction, although, like “The Brutalist,” it’s an immigrant saga, with more than a passing interest in design principles. (The Shakers, of whom only three practicing adherents remain today, are most famous for their minimalist wood furniture, a few examples of which we see here.) What unites the two films, beyond a highly artisanal sense of craft, is a respect for their protagonists’ ultimate unknowability. Just as Corbet beheld his brutalist with frosty admiration, Fastvold uses the stylings of the movie musical to dramatize, without quite penetrating, the mysteries of Mother Ann’s faith. Even as we follow this woman through her own stations of the cross—persecution, imprisonment, humiliation, martyrdom—we are kept at a skeptic’s respectful distance: thoroughly shaken, but not entirely stirred. ♦