The Testament of Ann Lee (2026)

Direction: Mona Festvold
Country: UK / USA

From Norwegian filmmaker Mona Festvold (The Sleepwalker, 2014; The World to Come, 2020), The Testament of Ann Lee explores the life of the leader and founder of the Shakers, an 18th-century British religious sect, through frenzied songs and dances that attempt to capture the feverish worship of its believers. Ominously introduced through music and movement—set to a score by The Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg—the film gradually loses momentum, becoming painfully dragging. 

Despite its decent premise, this exploitative mystery leaves much to be desired, with Fastvold knowing exactly where to put the camera but losing control over how long to let it roll. The result is a repetitive execution that struggles to evoke genuine chills, no matter how insistently it tries.

Completely missing the mark on the emotional side, The Testament of Ann Lee ultimately fails to resonate—I neither enjoyed it nor found it to offer anything particularly meaningful. It feels like a film more interested in exhibiting pain than in understanding it, weighed down by extended musical sequences that stall an already unsatisfying narrative. One might even call it an ambitious misfire, lost within its own artistic formula.

The World To Come (2021)

Direction: Mona Fastvold
Country: USA

Norwegian-born Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come presents a bold, revolutionary love story between two women living in a frontier rural farm in 1950’s upstate New York. Following a screenplay by Ron Hansen (The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford) and Jim Shepard (And Then I Go), the director approaches the subject - the self-educated Abigail (Katherine Waterston) - with poetic expression as she narrates her diary entries and clear-cut inner thoughts. 

Her burdensome, solitary life - she and her hardworking husband Dryer (Casey Affleck) recently lost a child to diphtheria - is suddenly struck by joy and astonishment when the confident and gracious Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) moves to the neighboring farm with her unsympathetic and insensitive husband, Finney (Christopher Abbott in his second collaboration with the director after performing in her 2014 debut feature The Sleepwalker). 

These courageous women have wasted a lot of time living an unhappy life. Certain of that fact, they resolve to spend every possible minute with each other, defying their husbands and the conservative norms of the time. 

Unlike Portrait of a Lady on Fire, this romantic period drama was not taken to a higher level due to its awfully familiar tones. Fastvold seems happy with just unpacking complex feelings and creating a mild uneasiness that lurks in the bucolic landscape. The pace, deliberately languid, is complemented with a glowing, well-composed cinematography, but the tension slowly fades away, leaving an illusive dreaminess floating in the air that is not completely cut and dried to me. I wish I could have liked this film more than I did.