In a time when movies are increasingly loud and boisterous, struggling to capture our ever-shortening attention spans, it's both refreshing and startling to find quiet, paused films. Yet this has been Kelly Reichardt's style since her debut River of Grass (1994). She's subsequently used her meditative and unhurried approach to demystify genres and tropes in Meek's Cutoff (2010), Certain Women (2016), and First Cow (2019). Her latest target is the heist caper with The Mastermind (2025).
Set in 1970 The Mastermind follows an unemployed and failed architect James Blaine Mooney (Josh O'Connor), who is listless and demotivated. His wife Terri (Alana Haim) is a secretary and the breadwinner of the family, also caring of their two rambunctious boys Carl (Sterling Thompson) and Tommy (Jasper Thompson). One day James decides to steal four paintings from his local art gallery in broad daylight, amidst the thrill of the heist, James then learns the difficulty of keeping his act hidden.
Employing, her usual slow and deglamorized approach, the first half of The Mastermind has Reichardt showing the rather quotidian way that James plans the heist. It is a wonderful puncturing of the Ocean's Eleven (2001) mystique around theft, and shows our thieves not as greedy men, but rather unmoored, searching for identity. It brings Reichardt's characteristic use of empathy over judgement for her characters; we are meant to observe a character's life instead of define them. The use of Reichardt's pace, helps redefine the crime genre on her terms, yet as she seeks to illustrate the rather wandering "now what?" feeling after the crime, The Mastermind begins to test viewers' patience.
The key to unlocking The Mastermind is in viewing it through the lens of the Vietnam War, protests of which are frequently shown in the background. The story is essentially a miming of the thrilling entrance into the war by an overconfident US, who only later finds out it has no comprehensive exit plan and instead finds itself grasping for answers, and questioning the cost of past decisions. Focusing on a listless man as a protagonist, who is directionless, further elaborates on the callous way that young men's lives were thrown away meaninglessly.
Reichardt steeps you into the frustration and impatience James feels when his lack of a plan leaves him on the run and wandering in the second half. Yet through this narrative tool, Reichardt also alienates and tires viewers. Most of Reichardt's films have been plotless, following a set of characters in a snapshot of their lives, but her characters have always brought rich inner lives and dilemmas. With James we see a rather blank and empty character, drifting towards some semblance of meaning. By having a dry lead, it becomes harder for viewers to follow eagerly. As a result, the second half is dull; effective in the way Reichardt wants to transmit the tediousness of criminal life, yet also redundant for viewers. As such, the denouement of The Mastermind feels more like a sentence trailing off than the effective emotional and thematic final note.
Reichardt brings new faces to her cast of players in The Mastermind. O'Connor is fantastic in the lead role, seeping part of his charisma, which proves crucial to viewers sticking around his character. The British actor is in a meteoric ascent in his career, showing an endless versatility that only keeps you hungering for more roles to come his way. I was rather disappointed with Haim, who was so electric in Licorice Pizza (2021) yet has been given background roles in her last two films: One Battle After Another (2025) and now The Mastermind. True, her main job is being part of her sibling band Haim, but I felt her muted performance in Reichardt's film misused her greater strengths.
In the end, Reichardt delivers another quiet and meditative film, deconstructing the myths around the life of crime. The Mastermind features Reichardt's curated attention to light, sound, and restrained performances. Yet the film's second half, seeking to imbue viewers with the same sense of restlessness and cluelessness as the protagonist, pushes too far in trying our patience, leaving many yawning and staring at their watches as the ploy veered away from thematic immersion and more towards narrative monotony.
