Although the biographical-musical film The Testament of Ann Lee is set in a radically different time, the story it’s telling is inherently timeless. Profiling the life of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), one of the founders of the “Shaking Quakers” movement of the 1700s, the film is a searing if uneven look at the how faith can simultaneously save and damn you. It seeks to resolve the age-old tension between the sanctity of human life and its inherent suffering. In doing so, it concludes such tension may be, in fact, irresolvable.

The film begins with Ann’s childhood of deprivation, hardship and pain. Later on, it follows her as she marries a boorish chud and endures the loss of four tots in quick succession. Being a woman of strident faith, however, Ann finds salvation in the Evangelical Revival that was sweeping through her native England at the time. Along with her brother William (Lewis Pullman), she becomes part of Shaking Quakers or “Shakers,” a religious sect whose ecstatic worship style deeply unnerves the local community and leads to her imprisonment. While stuck in the clink, Ann abstains from food for weeks and hallucinates about herself levitating, as well as the Garden of Eden. Already deeply squeaked out by sex due to her traumatic pregnancies, Ann takes these visions as a sign that copulation is the original sin of mankind. After she is finally sprung from the big house, she shares this insight with the rest of the Shakers—dramatically proclaiming that all worldly evil can be boiled down to a single word: fornication.

Ann’s intense conviction in this moment, not to mention the stone-cold silence of the rest of the Shakers, is one of the film’s few instances of wry humor. Most of its first half is the complete opposite though, acting as a ferocious portrait of one woman’s struggle to find meaning amidst a grim world of almost unimaginable suffering. Director Mona Fastvold, who also co-wrote the script with her partner Brady Cobert (of The Brutalist and Thunderbirds fame), fills the screen with stunning imagery, rich sound design and banger musical numbers. It’s filmmaking of the highest order—an evocative, beautiful, utterly absorbing fairy tale that recalls the best of Malick, Kubrick, Eggers and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cobert’s own historical epic. But Fastvold’s film is much more ethereal, earthy and witchy, and so, it manages to feel like its own thing entirely.

The Testament of Ann Lee maintains this propulsive momentum as the Shakers take Ann’s visions as a sign that she is the female reincarnation of Christ. Before long, she has been christened as “Mother Ann” and named the Shakers’ leader. Ann swears her followers to strict vows of chastity, pacificism and gender egalitarianism. And soon after, they leave England for the New World in the hope of finding an audience more amendable to their flailing, gyrating worship style, not to mention a lady preacher. Fastvold, along with editor Sofía Subercaseaux and cinematographer William Rexer, perfectly capture the horror of an 18th century Atlantic Sea voyage, with all of its claustrophobic holds and clammy decks. But they also convey the transcendent fire provided by the Shakers’, uh, “unshakable” faith. The show stopping song “All is Summer” sees Ann, as well as her Shaker flock, repeatedly converging on the deck of their ship to pray. Ann’s fist slamming repeatedly into the deck while the ship is buffeted at sea speaks powerfully to her conviction to conquer the elements through sheer force of will.

Given how rip-roaringly powerful The Testament of Ann Lee‘s first half is (I was moved to tears at least once), it is perhaps not a shocker that it can’t keep it up from beginning to end. Once Ann and the rest of the Shakers get settled in America, the storyline loses a bit of its fuel. There is probably no way around this on some level. By all accounts, the rage, determination and vehement faith that drove Ann and her followers across the sea ran into a wall of opposition in America just as it did in England, and the film plays that out. The nascent colonial society, you see, doesn’t take too kindly to the Shakers’ professed neutrality toward America’s revolutionary conflict against Britain. Nor do they much like the idea of a lady pastor saying off-putting, unhinged and wacky things like “I’m not just your mother; I’m also your mother’s mother.”

But even though the film is loosely following the historical record, it still has to find a way to make its character arcs and themes land. And Ann Lee struggles mightily in this regard. Major characters such as Pullman’s Lewis have nowhere to go. This is particularly galling because Fastvold sets up a potential arc by showing the character as closeted in the first half of the film, an obvious necessity given the intolerant and violent society in which Lewis lived. The film also isn’t even really clear on how it feels about Shakerism’s central tenant of chastity and whether a creed that both affirms life while simultaneously denying it can ever serve as a lasting vehicle for social change. While there are glimmers of how they set the stage for a more humane, equitable and inclusive future (such as the presence of African Americans amongst their ranks), the film’s postscript mentions how the group slowly went from 6,000 strong down to just two today.

That lack of a clear resolution is not surprising given the contradictory nature of the woman at the heart of the Shaker faith. Like all of us, Ann Lee was thrust into a violent, chaotic and fallen world without her consent. And like all of us, she yearned to establish a refuge where there was “A place for everything, and everything [was] in its place.” Her modality for achieving that was through religion, which both delivered her from despair and accelerated her own oblivion. The movie explores both aspects equally, with Ann both coming off as a truly visionary leader and a deeply unwell, possibly even suicidal woman. In a sense, this is a bold play, as it denies the type of cathartic certainty that many other films might provide to the audience about their central character. But it undoubtedly also leaves you with a faint feeling of frustration, as if you’ve been introduced to a fascinating person whose true essence is destined to remain unknowable.

It is Seyfried’s characterization of the film’s heroine that makes it still work. Over the years, Seyfried has slowly morphed into one of my favorite actresses, primarily because of her love for performing in romantic comedies and musicals (she’s terrific as Cosette in Les Misérables and as Sophie in the camp classic Mamma Mia). But she has probably never been better than she is here. She embodies both Ann’s enlightened spirit but also all of her unstable, possibly self-destructive tendencies. Despite the period setting, this makes the character feel refreshingly, wonderfully alive, as we are all heavily dichotomized at our core. Due to this stellar work, it doesn’t matter that Fastvold’s film occasionally becomes mired in the muck of earthly contradictions. You remain invested in Ann’s riveting struggle to reach the divine.