Loved by lovers of French film who can tell their Bresson from their Melville, The Mastermind is a touch inert if you come to it expecting what it’s billed as – an art-heist thriller. Instead Kelly Reichardt and her star, Josh O’Connor, cook up something altogether more speculative, meditative. Dull?
We are largely denied the joys of the heist movie – watching a meticulously planned operation as it is put into play. Instead Reichardt does a “what if?”. What if the mastermind is at the last minute called on to mind the kids, for instance. Just one of many handfuls of grit thrown into the well-oiled machine – which isn’t that well-oiled in the first place.
Reichardt’s story is set in the 1970s and the heist is based on a real one, at the Worcester Art Museum in 1972, when a Gauguin, a Picasso and a Rembrandt (which turned out to be by someone else) were coolly lifted off the gallery walls and walked out of the museum in broad daylight.
That’s what happens here – after “mastermind” James Mooney (O’Connor) gets round the problem of the kids, and his getaway driver’s sudden last-minute attack of nerves, his heisters walk into a gallery and methodically take down some paintings by Arthur Dove, slip them into cotton bags run up on the sewing machine of Mooney’s wife (Alana Haim) and leave. And that’s the job done.
In the trad heist movie, planning eventually meets luck, and at that point the operation teeters between success and failure. Here, Mooney gets more than his fair share of luck, but it’s all good.
The trad heist movie typically has a structure leading up to the heist. Reichardt’s gets all that out of the way early on, and instead focuses on what happens next. It’s not easy to get rid of a painting, it turns out, and the guy who was the obvious go-to fence before you had the goods can turn out to be a flake once you do have them. It strengthens his hand. Then there’s the problem of where to hide out until the heat dies down. What do you tell these dope-smoking friends (John Magaro, Gaby Hoffmann) you’ve suddenly landed on and who you haven’t hung out with since college days?
O’Connor’s performance is from the book of Robert Bresson, minimal to the point of nothingness. Even so, we get inklings as to what Mooney is about. He is not the heroic criminal loner, for instance. We learn in scenes with his parents (Bill Camp, Hope Davis) that he’s a failed architect with no real plan for the future, who harbours grudges against the Man and is countercultural because it’s the soft option. This is not Mooney’s one-against-society lunge for significance but his attempt at being an entrepreneur. But he doesn’t have what it takes. The job is financed, on a don’t-tell-dad basis, by money borrowed from his mother.
In the Reichardt oeuvre we’re somewhere between Night Moves, which wondered about the counterculture and criminality, and First Cow, which took a genre and gave it a good shake.
Where did it go, that world – of a counterculture, of an America of big cars, iron bridges, general stores, hitch-hiking and cigarette machines, of a government infrastructure that was well run? In a quiet way, Reichardt wonders about all that, mashing together the downbeat moodiness of Jean-Pierre Melville and the affectless acting of Bresson.
So, downbeat. So downbeat, in fact, that you might wonder what the hell. One of the best movies of the year, in some quarters at least. It left me unexcited, but then that is the intention. The Mastermind is, if nothing else, artistically true to itself.
The Mastermind – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
