Reichardt begins in ironic key and ends in grace notes of nothingness, with a loose, jazzy heist film that gradually unwinds into a chilly, deadpan moral tale.
★★★★
Some spoilers below.
Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind announces itself as one kind of movie. It starts as a jazzy, Jarmusch-esque comedy loosely hung around a small-time heist plot, or maybe a baggy deadbeat spin on Jules Dassin’s Rififi, then wanders off toward something quieter and stranger.
In the Massachusetts suburbia of 1970, Josh O’Connor’s J. B. Mooney drifts between hardware stores and diners, planning to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from a local museum. The 16 mm texture and percussion-led score give all of this a hip, offhand, comic rhythm. But gradually the film withdraws from this premise. What begins as a caper turns into a study of logistical and moral failure. This is a heist movie that unpicks itself.
Reichardt’s screenplay pares everything down. The usual mechanics of setup, execution and fallout are barely there. What remains is procedural labour without result: men in basements trying on pantyhose masks, preparing a hiding place in a pigsty. Very quickly the heist falls apart, and life continues, albeit now on a relentlessly downward spiral. The humorous energy fades, and the film settles into a Bressonian observational rhythm that feels almost ascetic; a morality play stripped of pronouncement or explicit judgement, and very strong on male delusion.
O’Connor plays Mooney as a man convinced of his plan’s logic, but ill-equipped for the human factor. Around him, Alana Haim and Hope Davis watch the spiral with tense resignation. Meanwhile Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography gives Massachusetts a drained, overcast stillness, while Rob Mazurek’s score, his first for a narrative feature, uses percussion and brass as texture rather than propulsion.
By the end, the dramatic tension has given way to a cosmic shrug, an unresolved note that leaves the audience to decide whether it reads as karma, nihilism, or just a very human mess. But unlike our protagonist, Reichardt always knows what she’s doing.
The Mastermind played at the London Film Festival ahead of a theatrical release (Oct 17 US, Oct 24 UK) and will then be streaming on MUBI.
Whitlock&Pope 