THE MASTERMIND. Genius of Crime [REVIEW]

James’s gaze in The Mastermind carefully scans his surroundings. It glides over the paintings hanging on the walls, the dozing guards, and the children pestering their mother with otherworldly questions. Meanwhile, his hands are at work—gently turning the key, grabbing the figurine, closing the display case. The heist is over. Now all that’s left is to leave the museum with his wife and sons, tying his shoelace triumphantly under the guard’s nose as he exits. Of course, this is only the beginning—a small rehearsal for the big job that’s supposed to bring James a massive payday and a sense of personal fulfillment. Instead, it brings a ruined life and a crushing guilt he will likely never shake off.

When Kelly Reichardt turns to genre cinema, it’s usually to subject it to a process of deep deconstruction. Her distinctive slow-cinema style—lethargic pacing, delicate camera movements, long takes unfolding in real time—often does the work on its own. In The Mastermind, it’s the heist movie that gets dismantled, a genre defined by dynamism, witty dialogue, chases, and twists. Think of any installment of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series. Reichardt bends every one of those elements, proving their elasticity. She creates an anti-heist movie—a meditative action film.

Yet, she still manages to keep viewers glued to the screen. The director infuses her film with irony and grotesque humor: none of the crew members are cut out for the job, the plan is slapdash, and improvisation begins before they even enter the building. She plays the thieves’ ineptitude for laughs, staging one of the funniest robberies in cinema history—worthy of the Coen brothers in their prime.

When the tension from the botched heist subsides, the film subtly shifts its tone to match James’s new reality. Reichardt turns her attention to the repercussions faced by her protagonist—abandoning his family, drifting from door to door while fleeing American law enforcement. The second half of The Mastermind becomes a rich character study: an attentive observation of a man trying to untangle himself from an utterly hopeless situation. But Reichardt avoids psychological exposition.

Her spiritual mentor here is Robert Bresson, to whose Pickpocket she openly alludes (especially in the film’s brilliant final scene). We observe James intensely, yet we’re denied direct access to his inner thoughts. His motivations must be inferred from scattered clues: a disillusioned father who’s a judge, an unfinished art degree, endless idling at home, and his mother’s remarks about money borrowed in the past.

Josh O’Connor fits this mode perfectly—one of the brightest stars of his generation, currently at the height of his career. In Reichardt’s subdued films, “big emotions” are never performed. Her cinema thrives on subtle gestures and microexpressions, populated by withdrawn, taciturn, neurotic characters. The greatest challenge for her actors is not to act but simply to be—to internalize everything. O’Connor’s enigmatic, strikingly photogenic face is perfect for that.

Within it coexist a cynical trickster and a beaten puppy, an egotistical braggart and a pitiful loser who failed to foresee the consequences of his actions. His portrayal of James rhymes elegantly with his Arthur from Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera—another lost soul headed for inevitable downfall, both men guilty of thinking too much about themselves and too little about the world around them.

In this sense, Reichardt’s film carries an understated socio-political edge. The director deliberately sets the story in 1970s America, filling TV screens with footage of police beating students and the streets with antiwar protests and posters bearing Richard Nixon’s menacing face. Throughout the film, James tries to remain above it all—apolitical, opportunistic, detached. A true chameleon, distantly related to David Locke from Antonioni’s The Passenger. If only he had seen Antonioni’s masterpiece, he might have understood that such detachment is impossible—you can’t run from yourself any more than you can run from reality. Perhaps then his fall would have been softer, or at least less ironic and cruel.