Kelly Reichardt flips the art-heist movie on its head in The Mastermind, a sly, low-key character study that trades gadget-laden spectacle for lived-in detail and moral ambiguity. Loosely inspired by a notorious theft from the Worcester Art Museum, the 1970s Massachusetts-set film revolves around one unavoidable force: Josh O’Connor, whose tender performance as a slyly funny bad-idea-having family man suggests inevitability and devastation.
A Game Actor in Over His Head as a Family Man
O’Connor’s JB isn’t a smooth criminal; he’s an out-of-work carpenter who comes to the somewhat unhinged conclusion, with eerie stoicism, that stealing some modernist art just might fix things. The actor’s great trick is to render JB’s optimism captivating, not grating. O’Connor deploys stillness and micro-gestures — tight jaw, flicker of a blink, an apology half-swallowed — to convey a brain that’s forever two steps behind his own momentum. And it’s a performance grounded in physical detail, more Buster Keaton than smirking caper-smug leading man, and it works because O’Connor plays JB’s delusions with unshowy sincerity.
A graduate of critics’ favorite La Chimera and God’s Own Country, O’Connor here confirms a gift for men who misread the room. He’s hilarious when the plan falters, then heartbreakingly sincere when reality rears its head. The mastery promised in the title is the movie’s irony; the magnetism is genuine.
Reichardt’s Minimalist Heist With Texture to Spare
Reichardt subverts the typical genre grammar. There’s no locker room of specialists, no red-laser ballet, no humming vault. Instead, we have paper maps, library research and an anxious car ride to a drowsy museum guarded by security that seems disarmingly human. The suspense unfolds in muffled thuds and suppressed laughter, like a prank gone wildly out of hand. When the dust settles and the police appear, a theme emerges: The result is less “perfect crime” than “recognizable mistake,” which in fact is exactly the point.
That modesty doesn’t mean thinness. The crafts are quietly lush. The cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, bathes the proceedings in a muted glow that evokes 1970s American cinema without lapsing into parody. The wood-paneled interiors lit in amber, the soft grain on autumn exteriors — each shot has its own tactile pleasures of place. The mellow jazz motifs by the composer Rob Mazurek lend it a faintly bemused pulse, and production design leans into suburban modernism — gauzy blue lighting, rows of knitwear that might do as much storytelling as any line of dialogue.
A Road Story Haunted By A Nation’s Noise
Halfway through, the film shifts from heist to pursuit, transforming into a meandering, strangely genial road movie. Reichardt threads the turbulence of the era with a light touch: televised war coverage in living rooms, protest ephemera glimpsed through bus windows, conversations hinting at the language of draft resistance and disillusionment. The Vietnam War isn’t used as plot machinery, not by a long shot; it’s social weather there, influencing decisions and temperaments.
That social situation roots JB’s wobbly logic. It’s anxiety and pride that ride in the driver’s seat. Economists often cite the 1970s as one of those periods when working- and middle-class households experienced escalating prices alongside industrial contraction; Reichardt conjures that squeeze without giving a lecture. It’s in the awkward family dinners, the forced smiles, how JB’s parents — portrayed with fatigued precision by Hope Davis and Bill Camp — stare at the nightly news as though it might determine their son’s fate.
Supporting Players And The Ethics Of The Gag
Alana Haim, playing JB’s wife, Terri, does lovely work within a frustratingly narrow lane. She is a model of murmured vexation, imbuing silence with a sharpness that suggests a fuller interior life the script only partially explores. Meanwhile, John Magaro all but steals the show as Fred, an old friend who regards JB’s boldness as a cosmic joke. His sunny warmth contrasts with the pinched disapproval of Gaby Hoffmann’s Maude, sketching an off-screen history in tart asides and side-eye.
The humor lands because it’s never mean. Even at its most comic (a bumbled entanglement with a barn ladder might be the year’s best sight gag), the film remains faithful to its characters. That restraint is what makes Reichardt’s movie a kind of low comedy, in which audiences are permitted to measure the laughs against consequences. The F.B.I. has long called art crime a multibillion-dollar global enterprise, and although “The Mastermind” isn’t a procedural about recovery of stolen work per se, it’s calibrated to how theft sends shock waves through families, institutions and towns.
Form, Theme, and a Quiet Afterglow That Lingers
Reichardt has examined marginal lives and some tenuous aspiration in such films as “First Cow,” “Certain Women” and “Wendy and Lucy.” Here she appropriates a commercial vessel — the heist — and makes it into a delivery system for a story about American improvisation, the seductive promise of a shortcut and what happens when you pretend that plans are the same as outcomes. She leaves little neat and tidy and trusts the viewer to sit with unrest.
What endures is O’Connor’s stare, steady and searching and a little lost, as well as the film’s gently comic sadness. The Mastermind isn’t designed to sparkle in a traditional manner. It flows like a memory you are visiting again, seeing new colors every time. There will be some who wish for more: fireworks and gloss and hoopla, but those willing to embrace a whisper of a caper, carefully watched, may find themselves comforted by this quietly transfixing gem.
Verdict: A Quietly Transfixing Heist That Sneaks Up
Elegant, hilarious, and emotionally rigorous, The Mastermind confirms Kelly Reichardt’s talent for reframing American myths — and hands Josh O’Connor a role that fully exposes the charisma of his art. It’s a heist thriller that sneaks up on you.