The Mastermind review: Josh O'Connor leads art-theft film that will "stay with you in its aftermath"

Set in the early 1970s, O’Connor’s James is an unemployed carpenter in Framingham, Massachusetts, married to Terri (Alana Haim) and father to their two boys, Tommy and Carl. In need of money, early on, we see him requesting funds from his mother (Hope Davis). She suggests that his father, a Circuit County Judge (Bill Camp), can’t know. But it’s clear that life hasn’t quite worked out the way James, an art school dropout-out, has wanted.

When the film opens, he’s casing Framingham’s art museum, even lifting a small figurine from a glass display case while his kids lark around. However, the real plan he hatches is to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the building, along with his cohorts. The heist itself is both comical and shocking. Two of the gang, wearing stockings to disguise their features, sneak the paintings past a security guard, who seems to be forever dozing.

Things go awry when one, Ronnie (Javion Allen), pulls a gun on a teenage girl who encounters them. Thankfully, no bullets are fired, but suddenly this art theft takes on a deadly slant. Worse is to come as James’ plans to sell the paintings go disastrously wrong, while Gibson is caught for a bank robbery, immediately pointing the finger at James as the mastermind of the museum theft. James has little choice but to go on the run, leaving Terri and the kids at his parents’ house.

Scored with a jazzy, double-bass and percussion-heavy sound, Reichardt’s film is certainly not a thriller. Rather, it’s a character study of a man who gets it all wrong, and maybe always has. He visits friends (Gaby Hoffman, John Magaro) who are astounded at his crime, before attempting to make his way to Toronto to escape, even looking to counterfeit his passport. The longer it goes on, the more desperate he becomes.

Typically of a Reichardt movie, not a great deal happens on the surface. There’s even a protracted sequence where James hides the paintings in a barn on a farm, painstakingly taking them up a ladder to a loft area, then lugging a wooden storage box up there. It seems to go on for an eternity, and Reichardt clearly wants it this way. Likewise, most of the drama is off-screen, such as the fight that James and Terri have, which causes a cut over his eye. We also never even see his father’s reaction to his son’s theft.

With the backdrop of the Vietnam War era (“weird times, huh?” as one character puts it), The Mastermind is one of those films that does stay with you in its aftermath, especially thanks to a sublime, morally snappy ending. Yet, whether that will be enough for some is another matter. Those expecting some sort of Michael Mann-esque tale will be sorely disappointed.

An on-form O’Connor reprises, to some degree, the role he played in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, as a man who robs antiquities. What is a pity is how underdeveloped Haim’s character is. The musician and star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, is sadly given little to do here (though she makes a fair fist of a thin role).

In the end, The Mastermind is exactly what you might expect from its director: another low-key look at human foibles.

The Mastermind screened at the Cannes Film Festival 2025 but does not currently have a UK release date.

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