Amanda Seyfried is God

It's hard to resist comparing The brutalist with Ann Lee's WillTwo films written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbett, in which this creative and romantic couple alternated directing duties. Both films can be interpreted as critical reinterpretations of the founding myth of the United States through the portrayal of two unorthodox characters who, in different ways, propose utopias that challenge thestatus quo of her time. The similarities end here, since, in her second feature film as a director, Fastvold proposes a risky and unusual look at an unclassifiable female character.

Ann Lee's Will It's a biographical historical drama and a musical with a subtle feminist message, centered on the real-life figure of Ann Lee (a phenomenal Amanda Seyfried), a pioneering 18th-century religious leader and founder of the Shaker sect. Her followers were pacifists and celibate, believed in gender equality, and practiced rituals to achieve religious ecstasy through choral singing and spasmodic group dances, in a feverish communion between spirit and body. The film is artistically impeccable—the musical numbers are prodigious, combining extreme physicality and technical virtuosity, and the experimental soundtrack is by Daniel Blumberg, winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Score. The brutalist–It ends up being narratively exhausting and quite ambiguous in its opaque portrayal of this mystic, ahead of her time and convinced of being the reincarnation of God on Earth. A difficult claim to accept for those of us who don't participate in the Shaker cult, but absolutely plausible after attending the tour de force Seyfried's acting, physical and musical performance is closer to divine revelation and supernatural possession than to any earthly interpretive method.