When we first glimpse the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in the stunning new film that bears his name, he is lying on a corpse-strewn beach, looking near death himself. It’s 1511, and he has just participated in the Portuguese conquest of Malacca, a historic state in what is now Malaysia. “Magellan” was written and directed by the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who composes this scene—and many others that follow—as a kind of tableau vivant, presented at a remove that places equal emphasis on characters and environments. Diaz’s technique allows you to relax into the frame and absorb every detail: the bodies scattered along the shore, the tide running red with blood. It takes a moment to register Magellan’s presence at all, and to see that he is played by Gael García Bernal, a stealer of hearts the world over but, in this role, neither a romantic lead nor a conquering hero.
Two years later, Magellan is again by the sea, but now back in Lisbon, where he’s confronted by a host of women in black: they are the widows of men who perished on the voyage, and they’re desperate for answers. (Here, too, Diaz tempers realism with near-ceremonial formalism.) Magellan cannot account for his actions; he knows only the cold, acquisitive language of power. Hoping to impress King Manuel of Portugal, he ticks off the benefits of a westward sea route to the Spice Islands: “More territories for Portugal. More Christian conversions. Halting the Islamic advance.” But the poet Francisco de Sá de Miranda (Paulo Calatré) provides a clearer-eyed assessment: “We are killing so many . . . in the name of the crown and God.” Magellan experiences no such pangs of conscience, and he shows no loyalty to any one crown. Spurned by Manuel, he aligns himself with Spain, which grants him the fleet he desires. More killing awaits.
Diaz, now sixty-seven years old, is a venerated figure at international film festivals, his work justly acclaimed for its observational acuity and novelistic texture. His approach is often described in terms of what he doesn’t do: he is skeptical of narrative convention, allergic to closeups, and loath to move the camera within a scene—unless, as in “Magellan,” it happens to be on a raft, floating downstream under a gentle tropical shower, or on a ship, bobbing along on Atlantic waves. (The director shot and edited the film himself, with Artur Tort.) He also shies away from direct depictions of slaughter, preferring to cut to the aftermath, with gruesome matter-of-factness. “Magellan” isn’t an action movie; it’s a consequence movie. But Diaz, within all this meticulous subtraction, adds dramatic heft and political meaning. In draining any visceral excitement from violence, he subtly decolonizes the camera’s gaze. “Magellan,” a tale of death, disease, mutiny, and mutually assured destruction, is the most powerful anti-imperialist epic I’ve seen since Lucrecia Martel’s “Zama” (2018), which fixed a withering comic glare on the expansionist bloodlust of eighteenth-century Europe. Diaz’s instincts aren’t as viciously funny, though a bone-dry comedy does rear its head when one character loses his: during the voyage, a shipmaster, caught having sex with a cabin boy belowdecks, is put to death for “crimes against nature.”
Where does such a charge leave Magellan, despoiler of every Eden he encounters? The film, to its credit, does not skimp on paradisiacal visions. Every shot of the tropics is a painterly study in lush foliage and golden-pink sunlight; the beauty of the natural world seems, if anything, magnified by Magellan’s encroaching, annihilating threat. Such visual wonders will hardly surprise admirers of Diaz, whose work has encouraged contemplation, and at marathon lengths. His “Evolution of a Filipino Family” (2004) clocks in at nearly eleven hours, and he has spoken of a nine-hour cut of “Magellan,” which purportedly gives a fuller account of the explorer’s briefly seen wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo). Presumably, it would dive even deeper into the conflicted soul of Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), an enslaved man who serves as Magellan’s interpreter, and who, in this telling, plays a role in his master’s ignominious defeat, in 1521.
By Diaz’s standards, this abridged version is fairly smooth sailing. It has a movie star at the helm, after all, and runs a mere two hours and forty-three minutes. Truthfully, it doesn’t run so much as flow, with hypnotic grace and a grim, sorrowful momentum, but it does build to a properly cacklesome finish, not long after Magellan’s men attempt to force their Christianity on the Philippine island of Cebu, where the Indigenous would-be converts respond with force of their own. You’d think the leader of the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe would know that what goes around comes around.
What are we to make of the season bringing us not one but two artful bio-pics, each centered on a boldly ambitious, stubbornly deluded visionary who sets out across the sea, bent on converting the masses to Christ? I’m not sure, but Ann Lee, the British-born evangelist who sailed to America in 1774 and led the Christian sect known as the Shakers, would scoff at the idea of coincidence. In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a mesmerizing oddity from the director Mona Fastvold (“The World to Come,” from 2021), Amanda Seyfried proselytizes up a storm as Mother Ann, as Lee is known to her coterie of faithful followers in eighteenth-century Manchester. Bent on experiencing a radical depth of intimacy with God, Ann leads her disciples in extended, highly expressive sessions of musical worship: again and again, the Shakers close their eyes, hurl their arms heavenward, and transfigure their ecstasy into song. “All is concert / all is summer,” they croon, in the most fervently incantatory of their numbers.
Fastvold takes the “all is concert” part quite literally. The women may wear bonnets and Pilgrim-esque collars, but “The Testament of Ann Lee” is stylized in ways that go beyond the traditional cinematic grammar of the period piece; it’s a full-bore musical extravaganza. The Shaker hymnal, in the hands of the composer Daniel Blumberg, becomes a maddeningly infectious soundtrack. The cinematographer William Rexer follows the actors through dance formations that are choreographed with stately simplicity but executed with a furious, stomping athleticism; the lilting repetitions of the music are matched by chest slaps and footfalls. Crossing the sea to New York, Ann and her flock aim to worship without ceasing, even—or especially—when the ship is tossed about in a violent tempest. Jesus calmed the waters with a simple “Quiet! Be still”; the Shakers kick up such a holy ruckus that some members of the crew are tempted to chuck them overboard.
How reasonable you find this temptation may determine the limits of your own tolerance for “The Testament of Ann Lee.” I confess that I was held so spellbound by Fastvold’s musical flights of fancy—and by the attendant sweep and muscularity of her filmmaking—that I felt let down by the more prosaic moments, when everyone doesn’t erupt into song and dance. The music tells the story: amid such relentless melodic heaves and percussive thrusts, you needn’t listen too closely to detect a whisper of sublimated eroticism. That’s fitting, for the Shakers preach a doctrine of strict celibacy—one that Ann attributes to a God-given vision, although the movie traces it back to her cramped and impoverished Manchester childhood, during which she’s repulsed by the sight of her father pawing at her mother. Ann’s sexual disgust deepens years later, when, still in England, she marries a lusty blacksmith, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), and births four children, none of whom survives infancy—a tragedy that she sees as divine punishment for fornication. By the time the couple land in New York, Ann has renounced the gratifications of the flesh, and, eventually, Abraham abandons the marriage. Ann’s closer companion is her adoring brother, William (Lewis Pullman), who obeys her without question—even forsaking his male lover, in a glancing subplot, to pursue the Shaker way.
This is the latest picture that Fastvold has co-written with her partner, the director Brady Corbet; they also worked together on his films “The Childhood of a Leader” (2016), “Vox Lux” (2018), and “The Brutalist” (2024), a fictional portrait of a postwar Hungarian American architect which felt richer and truer in its detailing than do most bio-pics. “The Testament of Ann Lee,” by contrast, is a bio-pic that feels contorted into fiction, although, like “The Brutalist,” it’s an immigrant saga, with more than a passing interest in design principles. (The Shakers, of whom only three practicing adherents remain today, are most famous for their minimalist wood furniture, a few examples of which we see here.) What unites the two films, beyond a highly artisanal sense of craft, is a respect for their protagonists’ ultimate unknowability. Just as Corbet beheld his brutalist with frosty admiration, Fastvold uses the stylings of the movie musical to dramatize, without quite penetrating, the mysteries of Mother Ann’s faith. Even as we follow this woman through her own stations of the cross—persecution, imprisonment, humiliation, martyrdom—we are kept at a skeptic’s respectful distance: thoroughly shaken, but not entirely stirred. ♦
