Mona Fastvold makes period films about women who believe in something and keep to themselves, and she films them best when they are singing or working rather than talking. She is a director of considerable patience who does not yet quite trust her own pictures.
Fi1m perspective
In The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) a room of people in plain wool begins to sing, then to stamp, then to spin, and one or two of them fall down, and Fastvold stops everything else to watch. She does not cut away and nobody explains. This is the thing she does: when her people are using their bodies, praying or dancing or working a field, the camera stays until the thing is finished. Celia Rowlson-Hall choreographs it and Daniel Blumberg scores it, and we sat through the first of those services braced to be embarrassed on everyone's behalf and were not. The stamping goes on long enough to stop being a number and become a congregation. Then a narrator arrives to tell us what we have just seen.
She came to this slowly. A child actor on Norwegian television, then a director of music videos, she made her first feature, The Sleepwalker (2014), with Brady Corbet as co-writer: a small, well-acted psychological drama that critics liked for its mood and faulted for giving so little away. Since then she has run two careers side by side. She co-writes the films Corbet directs, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), Vox Lux (2018) and The Brutalist (2024), and she directs her own: The World to Come (2020), a quiet film about two women on a farm, shot on 16mm, and then Ann Lee, which is her loud one. In between she has directed television, The Crowded Room (2023) and Long Bright River (2025).
Actors are the first thing to say for her. Amanda Seyfried is remarkable from end to end in Ann Lee, and the two of them have now worked together twice; Christopher Abbott has turned up three times. The period worlds are the second: plain wool, bare rooms, film grain, all of it done with care. The fault is the one we found in The Brutalist, which she wrote with Corbet. László Tóth comes up out of the hold of a ship and the Statue of Liberty swings upside down over him, and the shot got us before we had time to think about it. The film then spends three and a half hours making sure we have understood. Ann Lee has the same trouble in a smaller frame: between the hymns it explains itself, at length. Long Bright River has a good pair of sisters and eight episodes of wrapping, and we could not have told you which episodes were hers, which in television is a virtue of a kind.
"I’m always searching for the perfect choreography between the camera and the performer," she has said, and more than once she has found it. What she has not yet learnt is to stop when the dance is over. Start with Ann Lee for the services and The World to Come for the quiet; keep The Brutalist for an afternoon when you have the patience for its second half.
Biography
Mona Fastvold is a Norwegian filmmaker and screenwriter. She co-wrote the screenplay for The Brutalist (2024) with Brady Corbet, who directed the film. She also directed and co-wrote The Testament of Ann Lee (2025).
Fastvold made her feature directorial debut with The Sleepwalker (2014), which she co-wrote with Corbet. She has directed The World to Come (2020) and co-written films including The Childhood of a Leader (2015), Vox Lux (2018) and The Mustang (2019). The Brutalist received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture.
Fastvold has collaborated extensively with Corbet on writing and directing projects. She previously directed music videos and worked in experimental theatre.
