It’s also thrillingly strange. The Shakers were so named because their worship practice included singing, stomping, hollering, and spasmodic movements that they called “laboring.” Fastvold worked with the choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, who infused the film with eccentric movement, and with the composer Daniel Blumberg, whose new arrangements of traditional Shaker hymns are both rapturous and propulsive. The film is part bio-pic, part musical, part religious awakening, part feminist epic. Ann Lee was one of the first women to lead a religious movement, which she based on the radical idea that sexual intercourse was the root of all human suffering and should be renounced for a life of celibacy. Before she became a Shaker she had four children, all of whom died in infancy. The role required a serious bodily investment from Seyfried, who is shown giving birth, nearly starving to death, almost drowning at sea, and being beaten, battered, and imprisoned for her beliefs. Watching a scene in which Ann Lee is locked in a jail cell and begins having visions, you truly believe that she is a woman possessed by faith.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter