The Mastermind (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Mastermind (2025) – K. Reichardt

I guess I lost track of director Kelly Reichardt since the pandemic but I have enjoyed all of her films that I’ve seen (particularly Old Joy, 2006, and First Cow, 2019). With The Mastermind, Reichardt has brought her technique and themes to the heist drama. (It is always hard to know whether these arthouse directors choose to make genre films to attract a wider audience, for commercial prospects, or because, like many of us, they are truly fond of the genres). The setting is Framingham, Massachusetts, circa 1970. Reichardt and her team (including longtime cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt) use film stock and camera techniques to evoke films shot in this period (gauzy, washed-out colour) alongside pitch-perfect art design and set-decoration and costumes (furniture, cars, buildings, shirts, dresses, etc.).  The plaintive jazz soundtrack by Rob Mazurek lends an emotional note to the proceedings even when some scenes are scored only by extended drum solos. The plot centres on Josh O’Connor’s failing carpenter/architect/art-school graduate, married (to Alana Haim) with two young sons, who concocts a plan to steal some abstract paintings from the local art gallery with a couple of local guys/friends. Reichardt takes us step-by-step through the caper and its aftermath in true slow-cinema style, allowing viewers’ awareness of the genre to fill in some of the gaps in the plot as she hones in on a character study of O’Connor’s “mastermind”. Rather than using other characters to psychoanalyse him, Reichardt allows O’Connor’s actions (and the little bit of context we glean about him and his past) to help viewers to draw their own conclusions. The film concludes, with Vietnam War protests on TV and on the streets, with a sort of sudden ironic joke and no denouement (possibly one could see 2/3 of the film as a long long denouement, I guess!).  Slow but always absorbing.