The Mastermind Review (Locarno Film Festival 2025)
Kelly Reichardt, a filmmaker long cherished by critics and loyal festival-goers alike, has developed something of a ritual: premiering her films within the Big Five circuit after long stretches of anticipation. This time, The Mastermind stirred murmurs across borders, leaving smeared smiles on the faces of the lucky few who caught it ahead of its theatrical release later this year.
After five films mapping the social microclimates of Oregon, Reichardt rewinds half a century and pivots eastward, landing in the 1970s of Massachusetts. The city is crumbling under Nixon-era fatigue. There, we meet James (Josh O’Connor, dialling into his delicate register after La Chimera), a family man with the ghost of an artistic past, now lying low under his mother’s apron, who covertly finances his ‘project’ in the hope it might finally shake him back into life.
But James is not out to pursue any ordinary project. Following in the wide-eyed footsteps of likeminded heist protagonists, he sets his sights on robbing the local museum. Before you jump to imagining cinematic heists with laser beams, air vents, and international art laundering networks, let’s pause. James’s operation is alarmingly analog: paintings are lifted by bare hand, carried off in pillowcases, with leggings on the head. He transports them to a remote pig farm, where they sit in confusion among hay bales.
It is all whimsical and amusing, especially when considered in light of real-world heists like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of the 1990s which red-flagged the modest security means up until that time. But Reichardt is not simply re-enacting a low-tech crime. The scene plays out like a send-up of the cinematic heist genre itself, and perhaps, too, a nostalgic nod to the bygone era before museums were airport-security-adjacent and gallery guards could still have a nap on that stool in the corridor.
True to her fashion, Reichardt strips the story of The Mastermind down and adds no gloss. There’s something of The Pink Panther in the film’s music dressings, and of Jacques Tati in the way space and volume entertain the eye in moments when the plot wanders off to stretch its legs. Reichardt is clearly an observant – but she is also playing with James, who, while handy enough if you need a petty thief, falls far short of the title he gives himself. Reichardt is attentive to James, enough to give him the golden-hour light for his act and spare him from any domestic noise (even though his working wife is left to deal with the twins – the brilliant real-life brothers Sterling and Jasper Thompson – with boisterous limbs).
Her intention, it seems, is not to mock him cruelly, but to watch with a dash of amusement as he collapses into his own inadequacy. Hence, the title The Mastermind lands like a deadpan punchline. As I write this, I’m thinking of Terri (Alana Haim), James’s wife, who glides through the film like a barely audible sigh. She is that rare figure: a voice of reason never granted the stage, on the other end of a payphone while her husband rambles about his mistakes and begs to be wired money to get by. But she knows better.
All of this is awesome and funny, if you think about it. Parental responsibility, the gendered labour within families, and that strange permissive take of the 1970s, where failure could still be charming. Coming from Reichardt, who has long been outspoken about the challenges of funding her films (particularly in an industry that sidelines female directors), it’s hard not to read this as a farce with a smirk. That The Mastermind, financed by MUBI, was made possible through yet another industry’s misconduct only completes the joke.
★★★★
In UK cinemas on October 24th/ Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffman, John Magaro / Dir: Kelly Reichardt / MUBI / 15
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