The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)

Director: Mona Fastvold

Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: This is going to sound like I am damning with faint praise, but if I just happened to be a Shaker, this would quite obviously have been the best film ever made.

And yet, I am not. So it’s going to have to be something other than that.

I’m always a little leery of a pointedly religious film. A sermon is one thing. A film is another. When a sermon is working at its best, it has to tell us something. When a film is working at its best, it has to show us something. The two are at odds with one another.

Here, we are clearly shown something, and the moments where Mother Ann (Seyfried) experiences religious ecstasy are exquisitely produced. I don’t for one moment doubt Seyfried’s performance.

And yet, I’m left to wonder. Are we supposed to feel as Shakers do when the film is unfurling before our eyes? I don’t think I’m any more interested in a life of celibacy after having watched the film than I was before seeing it. I can’t help but wonder if the way the Shakers… er, shake… is nothing more than theater trying to paper over oceans of doubt. Is Ann deluded for thinking that she is the second coming? Are the Shakers doomed* as an ongoing concern if they’re dead-set on not making any new Shakers? Are all religious movements merely byproducts of their charismatic leader’s hangups and trauma**?

If I’m think about these films, has the film really worked its magic on me? Perhaps an even better question is: Is its magic even meant for me?

*Stick around for the end credits. They are, indeed, doomed.

*I mean, probably.

The Night House (2021)

Director: David Bruckner

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin

Content Warning: Suicide

Have I Ever Seen It Before: Never. Had it not been for Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, it would have completely missed my radar.

Did I Like It: Pieces of the film work well. Rebecca Hall is always an interesting performer, and aside from a few effects in the early goings, the cinematography and art direction are pristine throughout.

Aside from that, though, it feels like the film will disappear from my memory at or near the instant I finish this review and/or the Beyond Cabin episode posts. At its core, I think it makes many of the same mistakes made by Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath (2000)—another  movie that has long since inspired echoes of, “Wait, that was a movie?” Both films are trying to embrace a modern Hitchcockian sensibility, but the trappings of a Hitchcock yarn are apparently not enough for the modern audience, so it also has to be a ghost story.

Maybe this fusion can be done well, but the plot machinations that make Hitchcock Hitchcock have to be as immaculate as the cinematography and art direction. Here there are just one-too-many-red herrings (was her (Hall’s) friend (Goldberg) also having an affair with the husband (Jonigkeit); what did the neighbor know?) that it feels like a lot of wasted screentime dwelling on them.

These could be forgiven alone, but the movie also spends a significant amount of time—and doing so with some skill—communicating Beth’s intelligence to us. The sequence where she does a little bit of magic with MacOS and begins to unfurl her husband’s secrets was good in its simplicity, but the problem remains: If Beth is truly this bright, how did she not piece together that something was not quite right while Owen was still alive? I believe it was Siskel and/or Ebert who would complained at no end about a movie that arbitrarily needed its characters to be stupid to contain the story at hand. I can only imagine (and could probably go look it up, but again, this movie is already slipping from my memory) what they might have said about a movie that suddenly needs a character to be smart for the first time in fifteen years, for fear of the plot collapsing in on itself.

One more note before we leave: Some streaming services will offer some manner of content or trigger warnings, and it should really be standard across platforms. I’m not bothered by depictions of suicide, but it can cause real harm.