The first full The Testament of Ann Lee trailer arrives with the force of a revelation. Amanda Seyfried‘s Ann doesn’t simply stare down the camera; she looks like she’s trying to drag you into whatever storm she’s courting. Even if you’d never heard of the Shakers before, this footage makes their worship feel less like pious ritual and more like a collective possession.
Searchlight Pictures is using this trailer to push the film beyond festival and specialty‑cinema circles. After a Christmas Day 2025 theatrical opening—including 70mm presentations—they’re rolling it out to more theaters through January and February 2026. The message is clear: this isn’t a museum piece. It’s an experience.
How The Testament of Ann Lee Trailer Sells a 70mm Faith Experience
The Testament of Ann Lee trailer leans hard on bodies in motion. We see Shaker worship as a kind of organized chaos: circles of dancers stomping and spinning, white sleeves blurring into one another, faces caught between rapture and exhaustion. Celia Rowlson‑Hall’s choreography, already sharp and unsettling in Vox Lux, looks even more intense here—every movement feels like both prayer and protest.
The 70mm emphasis isn’t subtle, and it doesn’t need to be. The official poster screams “EXPERIENCE IT IN 70MM” across Seyfried’s outstretched arm, framing her as a literal conduit between earth and something higher. The warm, almost sepia palette and the fabric detail in her sleeve tell you exactly why this format matters: it’s about texture. You’re meant to see the sweat, the grain of the wood, the threads in the garments, not just the outline of a costume.
Daniel Blumberg’s score, built around reimagined Shaker hymns, hums underneath the trailer as something between a dirge and a dance track. The combination of wide, carefully composed frames and off‑kilter music gives the whole piece a strange push‑pull energy—half reverent, half dangerous.
Amanda Seyfried’s Ann Lee Between Ecstasy and Control
What really anchors the Testament of Ann Lee trailer is Seyfried’s performance. The real Ann Lee was a British‑born founder of the Shaker movement, proclaimed by her followers as a kind of “female Christ.” The footage suggests Fastvold isn’t interested in softening that claim. Seyfried plays Ann as someone who believes completely in her own calling and is constantly checking whether her body can keep up with it.
Around her is an ensemble stacked with quietly intense performers: Thomasin McKenzie, Christopher Abbott, Tim Blake Nelson, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin. The trailer gives them flashes—a skeptical glance here, a hesitant step into the circle there—but never lets you forget whose orbit they’re in. This isn’t an ensemble drama; it’s a solar system movie, and Seyfried is the sun.
Fastvold and co‑writer Brady Corbet previously explored historical repression and desire in The World to Come and have been building out the ambitious The Brutalist. You can feel that ambition here, but turned toward faith and community rather than architecture or romance. The scale is bigger, but the preoccupation is the same: what happens to people when an idea becomes their entire weather system.
Why The Testament of Ann Lee Belongs in a Cinema, Not a Queue
We’re in a moment where a lot of “serious” period dramas end up as background noise on streaming. The Testament of Ann Lee looks like an argument against that trend. The trailer isn’t selling plot; it’s selling immersion—mud, sweat, hymns, and the social experiment of a utopia run on radical equality and strict devotion.
Searchlight positioning this with 70mm screenings over the winter is a signal flare to anyone who cares about form as much as content. This is a film that wants your full attention and a screen big enough for a hundred bodies to whirl in unison. It’s also, quietly, about questions that haven’t gone away: who gets to speak for God, who pays the price for belief, and what happens when a community builds heaven by cutting away everything that looks like earthly pleasure.
You can dismiss it as awards‑season “arthouse religion” and stay home, or you can treat it as one of the few genuine big‑screen gambles studios are still willing to make. Personally, I’d rather let this kind of devotion wash over me in a dark theater than on a half‑watched weeknight at home.
FAQ: The Testament of Ann Lee Trailer & Release
Why does The Testament of Ann Lee trailer push the 70mm format so aggressively?
Because the film’s power seems to come from density—of people, of movement, of physical detail. Emphasizing 70mm in the trailer and poster tells viewers this isn’t just another tasteful costume drama; it’s a chance to be overwhelmed by bodies in space, which simply plays better on a huge screen than on a laptop.
How does Mona Fastvold’s past work shape expectations for The Testament of Ann Lee?
In The World to Come and her earlier projects, Fastvold showed a knack for depicting intense emotional bonds inside rigid social structures. Knowing that, it’s reasonable to expect Ann Lee’s story to avoid simple hagiography and instead dig into the messy, human cost of building a utopia—something the trailer already hints at in its mix of ecstasy and unease.
