Ann Lee was a real woman who suffered real losses. Born in 1736 Manchester, she was the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith. Four of her children died in infancy. The Anglican establishment hounded her. In 1774, she sailed to America with eight followers and built a religious movement premised on mandatory celibacy, ecstatic dance, and the conviction that she was the Second Coming of Christ. The Shakers, as they came to be known, peaked at 6,000 members across 19 communities. Today, three remain.

Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-written with her partner Brady Corbet, depicts all of this with considerable craft. Amanda Seyfried is fierce and fragile, luminously photographed and fully in command. The Shaker hymns, adapted by Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg, burrow under your skin. Shot on 70mm, the choreography captures the kinetic strangeness of ecstatic worship. Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of movie that wants you to admire its beautiful set pieces while making you miserable.

The first 40 minutes are an endurance test. Young Ann witnesses her parents coupling in their cramped quarters. (Unpleasant, sure, but half of preindustrial Europe saw the same and managed not to start extinction cults.) She marries a blacksmith who whips her during intercourse while reciting Revelation. Babies arrive and depart in quick succession. By the time Ann receives her vision (sex is the root of all evil; celibacy is the path to God), it reads less like revelation than recoil.

Fastvold and Corbet — the same couple who hit us over the head with a Looney Tunes–sized anvil during the second half of The Brutalist — are content with this. They saturate you with suffering, not to deepen understanding but to foreclose it.

A film willing to take religion seriously would ask harder questions. Is Ann right? If celibacy is required for salvation, doesn’t that mean God designed creation to end? Fastvold and Corbet ask none of this. They simply march Ann from Manchester to upstate New York, oppression to commune, affliction to triumph.

The movie’s original sin lies in the filmmakers’ superimposing their own political preoccupations onto a poor 18th-century woman — a kind of reverse noblesse oblige, the privileged conscripting the downtrodden into their ideological projects. “I really need this story right now,” Fastvold told Gold Derby. “I needed the story of this woman who maybe was America’s first feminist.” In her telling, Ann was preoccupied with rethinking gender identity — equality “was really all she wanted,” the director insists. We’re meant to admire Ann because she flatters our contemporary sensibilities, because in one scene she and her followers yell “Shame!” at a slave auction. Slavery was shameful, of course, but follow their theology to its logical conclusion: Would it have been better for those slaves’ descendants never to exist at all? The film wants the moral credit of the condemnation without the moral cost of the Shakers’ chief doctrine.

The film doesn’t trust its own better arguments. Take, for instance, its insistence on God being neither male nor female, reframed in conspicuously modern terms. Understanding God as beyond the categories that apply to creatures has a serious theological pedigree. As Saint Thomas Aquinas argued, God is ipsum esse subsistens (subsistent being itself), not one being among many. But the film isn’t interested in making that argument. It just wants you to feel that Ann is progressive, and her detractors are backward.

Everything outside the commune is painted accordingly. The rare depiction of a nuclear family is a father beating his daughter at the dinner table. Marital intimacy is tantamount to sadomasochism. Ann’s brother William is depicted as gay — no historical evidence supports this — as if to suggest he joined a celibate sect to suppress his sexuality. There’s no depiction of Christian living outside the Shakers’ sect, no engagement with the tradition Ann was departing from, no sense of why her claims to be Christ’s female incarnation were considered blasphemous. The message, essentially: Her beliefs were no crazier than the surrounding religious culture; she was just persecuted for being a woman preacher who opposed racism.

A better film would have grappled with the Shakers on their own terms, or simply gotten out of the way. This may have worked best as a documentary. Instead, Fastvold and Corbet give us two hours of manufactured anguish in service of a thesis they never interrogate.

Seyfried deserves better. So does Ann Lee. So does any viewer who went for a night out at the movies and left with a love letter to civilizational suicide.