The Mastermind Review: Kelly Reichardt Deconstructs the Heist Movie

Rejecting genre convention, the would-be thriller rushes through the theft, then lingers on its consequences. It’s a satisfying, character-driven choice, writes Yasmin Omar.   

In a shadowy, suburban basement, a plan is hatched. James (Josh O’Connor) explains, with detailed instructions, how his hired goons will steal four abstract paintings from Framingham Museum of Art, which he’ll sell on the black market. As genre rules dictate, what follows is a brisk series of victories and setbacks in the lead-up to, and execution of, the theft: dozing security guards, hotwired station wagons, unreliable henchmen and the like. Each event is set to a jazz score with all the subtlety of a hammer to the back of the head. And then? Silence. This is a heist movie that frontloads its mission. Rather than ending with the back-slapping male camaraderie of a job well done, The Mastermind changes focus. It dares to ask: what happens next?      

Such a bait-and-switch is to be expected from the writer-director Kelly Reichardt, a master minimalist who makes thrillers without the explosions (Night Moves, 2013), westerns without the train robberies (Meek’s Cutoff, 2010). She hones in on the details other filmmakers elide, cataloguing the labour inherent in surviving under capitalism. It’s the quiet minutiae of the everyday – loitering at bus stops, sipping coffee at greasy spoons – that form the beating heart of The Mastermind. These in-between moments reveal, in no uncertain terms, what sort of man James is. They allow the film to morph from a crime thriller into a character study. 

James belongs to a higher social strata than your typical Reichardt (anti)hero – who can invariably be found clinging onto the bottom rung – since his well-to-do parents provide a safety net. And he needs one. When we meet James, he’s unemployed, pressuring his mother (Hope Davis) to give him another loan and persuading his breadwinner wife (an underserved Alana Haim) to leave work early so she can look after their children. That he’s scrounging off his female relatives – during the Seventies’ women’s liberation movement, no less – suggests it’s his strangled masculinity that pushes him to commit robbery. But it’s not that clear-cut; other, later motivations complicate the issue. No matter. What’s most important, for both James and the film, is not the inciting incident; it’s the fallout. 

The ironically titled mastermind is a fitting addition to O’Connor’s repertoire. For 2024’s one-two punch of La Chimera and Challengers, he was similarly dirty, dishevelled, desperate and, in the former, stealing art. The actor thrives in this mode, dimming his shine and ineptly plodding through James’ unglamorous life on the lam. Reichardt photographs him like an Edward Hopper loner. Folded into diner booths and slumped against bus windows, O’Connor curls into a diminished posture that shows just how small James feels. The character’s brooding countenance and sparing dialogue imply he has the soul of a poet… yet every careless comment he makes shatters that image (as does onlookers’ repeated, belittling refrain that the thieves ‘didn’t think things through enough’). Make no mistake: competency porn this is not. The film frustrates our desire to see each stage in a grand plan fall into place – and it’s all the better for it. 

By slowing down to observe the aftermath of a heist, The Mastermind furthers Reichardt’s wider creative preoccupations. It deflates the posturing from a stereotypically male mode of storytelling, thereby illustrating that gender roles are socially constructed. It also comments on the commercialisation of art by having James and his crew steal paintings instead of the more logical get-rich-quick scheme of holding up a bank.

Where the director’s 2022 film Showing Up was about the difficulties of making art, this one is, in many respects, about maintaining control over your art – a key concern for Reichardt, who works outside the system, supplementing her income with teaching, so she can retain final cut. With The Mastermind she has shown, once again, just how much can be done at a small scale on a small budget. Long may she continue. 

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