Writer and Director: Kelly Reichardt
Josh O’Connor is having a busy Festival, appearing and indeed leading three of the biggest films. As well as the latest Knives Out instalment and The History of Sound, he stars in Kelly Reichardt’s 70s heist movie The Mastermind which, unusually for the genre, stages a very modest art theft at the start of the film and then watches it inevitably unravel as the organiser, the titular “mastermind” loses the paintings, his family and his freedom. Sometimes a little overly meditative, Reichardt has created a movie about being on the run.
James Mooney, know as “JB” is the unemployed son of a local judge in small town America and uses his young family to case a museum from where he plans to steal four abstract paintings by the same artist. Hiring two men to do the job, the plan proceeds but when one of them is arrested for a subsequent crime, JB’s plan falls apart, leaving a trail right back to him.
Reichardt’s movie opens in some style with scenes of JB testing the security at the gallery, a watchful presence observing everything but the art while posing as a tourist. As ever in this genre, the build up to the heist is exciting, a montage of activities, minor pilfering and the pushing of security boundaries that seem shockingly lax to a modern audience. With a little necessary and unexpected jeopardy – a schoolgirl in the wrong place at the wrong time and a badly parked car – the theft itself is nicely accomplished both by the villains and by the writer-director.
The immediate aftermath too is interesting, JB clearly hiding his crime from his wife and family, embroiled in domestic concerns involving his children and their routines which humanises him and makes JB a little bit inept. Is he really the master criminal he imagines or an unemployed dad chancing his arm? Nothing in the film suggests he has done this before or knows exactly what he’s doing, but for the most part, from taking the paintings somewhere safe to marvelling at his own audacity, the film gives JB the benefit of the doubt.
Beyond this, The Mastermind becomes sketchier, involving criminal gangs connected through JB’s heist buddy that isn’t fully articulated while the nationwide media campaign seems disproportionate given what the audience knows by this point, or at least, not well enough explained to motor the remainder of the film which largely involves O’Connor’s character alone, dropping in on friends who feel compromised and plotting various escape routes.
O’Connor is excellent, just enough ambiguity to suggest both a genius and a man who thinks he is better than he is, all layered underneath a fairly unremarkable father and husband. And in the several films he commands at the BFI London Film Festival 2025, O’Connor ably demonstrates his ability to hold a film and to continue to make his characters psychologically engaging even when he’s left to fend for himself alone.
Reichardt’s persistent jazz soundtrack becomes a little wearing, however the 1970s aesthetic is all the better for being modest, yet The Mastermind would have benefited from more fleshed out characters and a better understanding not only of why he did it, but why he was so easily betrayed
The Mastermind is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
