A biographical narrative of a minor iconoclastic religious movement and its founder as they, after a long journey, come face to face with the harsh realities of the American Dream.
While I appreciate that the duo behind this took some stylistic creative choices to depict the ecstatic nature of their communal rituals, I am clearly not this film's target audience. To me, it ultimately came of as superficial, unfocused, aimless and ultimately just downright boring.
To begin with, I couldn't empathize with Seymour's character at all; narrated by a devotee, the film moves from traumatic experience to traumatic experience, touching on how Ann Lee's actual lived reality might have shaped her core beliefs. Yet, strong performances aside, this is nowhere sufficient for a complex character study. If the intention was to instead focus on how Ann Lee's story as a mythological character was understood among her followers, then that too failed to me, as the way this narration was implemented was at best a slightly more elevated form of that in Forest Gump or the Green Mile.
There were other interesting angles to be taken, given how gender and racial equality are fundamental to this movement, but in the end this was barely addressed and instead I just don't really know what the film was trying to say instead. Maybe it just went over my head?