Kelly Reichardt draws on a real-life crime for her latest film, which, on the face of it, appears to be a movie all about a heist. A very low-level heist.

As part of a trio of three Galas screenings for the British actor, along with The History of Sound and Wake Up Dead Man, The Mastermind reinforces Josh O'Connor as possibly the face of this year's London Film Festival. But of those three, this will likely be the one that splits audience opinion.

An easygoing and measured performance sees O'Connor play James Blaine Mooney, (“JB”), a wastrel who thinks big. Despite an ostensibly normal life — he has a wife and two sons and dines regularly with his retired judge father and concerned mother — JB refuses to put in the work, spying instead an opportunity to steal four artworks from his local Massachusetts gallery. Pinning everything on the harebrained scheme, he just has to make sure it's a master plan.

It doesn't take long for us to learn just how ironic The Mastermind's title is. We see JB playing low-level confidence tricks on his mother and his wife, failing to improvise well, and picking bad partners in crime. As JB is told on more than one occasion, it's like he just hasn't thought things through. Where the constant surprise lies is in watching O'Connor flesh out this terrible thief; just don't expect it to be fast. This is Reichardt meticulously applying her realist style not so much to the crime, but to the mind of a wannabe criminal. And JB could really have any crime in mind; it just so happens in The Mastermind, he's an art criminal in the middle of the Nixon Presidency.

We spend a lot of this autumn-soaked film in JB's company. At times he can be taken at his word, as when pleading with his wife (the underused Alana Haim), he can't help but reveal that everything he did was as much for himself as it was for his family. Mostly, though, JB remains a bit of an enigma. The gulf between reality and his scheme is evident to everyone but him. As Rob Mazurek's fast-tempo jazz score shifts to drum solos, the increasingly alienated JB winds his way through unfortunate and increasingly unsavoury incidents to poetic justice, but always with a sense of obliviousness. Fortunately, through it all, we have O'Connor's soft mannerisms and characterful face: smiling, softly spoken, staring into the middle distance as he endures the endless misfortune he's heaped on himself.

As with any Reichardt film, The Mastermind relishes the mundane. Scenes build up only to fizzle out (JB often urges his wife to respond to him, to say something), as the plot moves on with the deliberate slowness of its protagonist's (master)mind. It gives us space to mull over the character and his plight, but such a resolute slow-burn that revels in the details and mediocrity of early-1970s life, even with Vietnam protests in the background, will likely struggle to hold everybody's attention to the end.

Stick with the cringing pain of JB's downfall though, and Reichardt's take on heist-comedy is a low-key revolution. There are several moments of direct comedy, although they are barely laugh-out-loud. One sequence, in which JB poorly stashes his plunder in a barn, is structured as a gag, but painfully drawn out (and more painful for him to experience). The final scene, a wonderfully framed comedy homage, completes the domino effect of comic suspense that this caper's built up for 100 minutes, even if it's only with a whimper.

While The Mastermind won't satisfy viewers looking for a hard-boiled heist movie or hit the comedy pangs others would like, it's undoubtedly another feather in Josh O'Connor's cap. It's also a part of Reichardt's filmography that, like a painting hanging in a gallery, is likely to find its value rising over the years.

The Mastermind was a Gala screening at the London Film Festival 2025