Deep in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through an old bank façade, is Gallery 734, the Shaker Retiring Room. Inside, there’s an austere bedstead, ladder-back chairs, a cast-iron stove, and a wooden pegboard running along the walls—all sourced from a village near Albany. A retiring room, according to the Shakers’ “Millennial Laws,” was a place to rest and reflect “in silence, for the space of half an hour, and labor for a sense of the gospel.” On a recent visit to the gallery, the filmmaker Mona Fastvold said, “I feel like I’m inside my world now.”
Fastvold’s new film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” out on Christmas Day, tells the story of the Shakers’ founder, played with wild-eyed fervor by Amanda Seyfried. In eighteenth-century England, Lee belonged to a sect nicknamed the Shaking Quakers, who expressed their faith through ecstatic singing and dancing. (Fastvold’s film is a quasi-musical.) While in prison for blasphemy, Lee had a risqué vision of Adam and Eve, and concluded that celibacy was the cure for worldly temptation. Her followers, who believed her to be Christ’s female counterpart, called her Mother Ann. In 1774, Lee led her small band to America, where they settled in upstate New York. (Her husband, not thrilled with the no-sex rule, peeled off.) True to their maxim “Hands to work, hearts to God,” the Shakers built furniture of exquisite simplicity—now worldly temptations sought after by collectors. Fastvold, who is Norwegian, noted the overlap with Scandinavian design. “Ikea is heavily influenced by Shakerism,” she said.
Fastvold became interested in the Shakers while directing her previous film, “The World to Come,” also a historical drama set upstate. She had been looking for music—something “that could have been passed down”—and came across a hymn called “Pretty Mother’s Home,” written by a Black Shaker sister named Patsy Roberts Williamson. “I started reading about the various utopian societies that were forming, and it took me down the rabbit hole to Ann Lee,” Fastvold said. “She’s maybe the first American feminist.” Before her jailhouse vision, Lee had birthed and lost four babies. “She somehow takes all that grief and turns it into this kind of power, this active choice of saying, ‘I’m going to mother the entire world.’ ”
The director was soon joined by Sylvia Yount, the head of the American Wing. “I feel at home in this room,” Fastvold told her, “because I spent so much time at Hancock,” a preserved Shaker village in western Massachusetts. During filming, there were only two practicing Shakers left in America, both in Maine, but a third joined the sect soon after production wrapped. (“Completely unrelated, but interesting,” Fastvold said.) The movie was mostly shot in Hungary. The production designer nabbed an original chair at a market in London, but much of the set dressing was reconstructed. “You can’t make something out of Styrofoam. It has to be wood, and it has to be beautifully joined together,” Fastvold, who wore all black, said. “We played around with some of their instruments, but that was not their greatest invention, we discovered.”
A glass case nearby displayed various items: bentwood boxes, a spool holder. The Shakers improved many household devices, like apple peelers and washing machines. These tools, Yount said, reduced labor for women: “This was about gender equality.”
“A lot of people don’t know that they invented a vise to make flat brooms,” Fastvold said, looking around. “You need a flat broom.”
Fastvold, who is forty-four, started out as a child actor and dancer in Norway. “I quickly realized, when I was eighteen or nineteen, that I was done being looked at,” she recalled. She moved to America in 2004 and directed music videos, including for her husband at the time, the musician Sondre Lerche. Brady Corbet, another child actor turned filmmaker, co-wrote and acted in her first feature, “The Sleepwalker,” from 2014, and they soon became partners in art and in life. Fastvold co-wrote Corbet’s 2024 film, “The Brutalist,” about a Bauhaus-trained Hungarian architect who designs a community center in postwar Pennsylvania. “Ann Lee” has some common elements—for one, an interest in chair design.
“I didn’t think about it until I was in the edit,” Fastvold said. “Then, all of a sudden, it struck me: the chairs. You think you’re making something completely different—it’s a musical about the founder of the Shakers, a totally different time period! Actually, no, it’s about an immigrant arriving in America, trying to create an impossible project in a place where that is unwanted, pushing new ideas around design.” Both characters, she observed, are akin to filmmakers, marching their followers toward some quixotic vision. “The films we make are always reflections of us. You can’t help it.”
Back in the retiring room, she eyed a wooden candleholder, like the ones that were re-created for her set, and fantasized about spending the night: “I’d light that candle, bring in a bunch of wildflowers, and then I would be happy.” ♦
