Kelly Reichardt’s newest film, The Mastermind (2025), just screened at SFF, but what was supposed to be a promising art-heist drama left us feeling a little underwhelmed and wishing it had done more.
It’s 1970, James Mooney (Josh O’Connor) and two accomplices walk into a museum in broad daylight and steal four expensive paintings. That is the easy part; the hard part comes after, as James’s life becomes a series of repeated escapes followed by further misfortune and impending capture.
Perhaps the most striking element of the film is its intricate jazz score, done by Rob Mazurek. There were so many moments of sonic brilliance using such minimal instruments, often with just the drums on their own playing complex, irregular beats in a fashion reminiscent of Birdman (2014). It gave the film a mysterious tone that felt both classic, an homage to the classic heist genre, and noticeably avant-garde. Unfortunately, the score alone seemed to be the only thing dragging the audience’s experience away from the bleak precipice of mediocrity, as there just simply wasn’t much else to get excited about. A score should uplift a film, not save it.
There is a certain, sadly resilient, down-and-out character that Josh O’Connor was made to play. In the brilliant year for cinema that was 2023, we were gifted La Chimera, wherein O’Connor plays a masterfully nuanced tomb raider, constantly searching for something just out of reach. It seems as though this is the role that The Mastermind wanted so desperately to give him once again, but in the process of doing so, they unknowingly clipped his wings. There is a dynamic range to him that feels underutilised in this film, as if we are waiting for a crack of humanity to shine through his exterior, the character’s turning point or a moment of realisation, but it never comes. Instead, we just get this sad, bleak persistence that seems a little flat and one-dimensional.
The film was written, directed and edited by Kelly Reichardt herself, so it is very much the product of one person’s vision in the same way that a Sean Baker or Coen brothers film feels decidedly cohesive and stylistically whole. However, Reichardt’s chosen aesthetic for this project just so happens to be extremely grey, slow and quietly depressing. This can work, we have seen it work, but it meant that the film felt extremely long, which is usually not a good sign, considering it didn’t even break through the 2-hour mark. The 70’s setting also seemed like an unjustified choice, and it seems as though the director only set the events in that world for convenience, to avoid the hassle of having to write around security cameras, phones, and modern-day police intelligence.
Sorry to disappoint all you Ocean's 11 fans, this is not a heist movie. But the fact that it claims to be, especially in the way it was marketed, might be why it feels like we were cheated out of something. The stakes don’t seem to increase after a certain climax point early in the film, and as a result, there is barely rising tension. On top of this, the linear plot was unendingly predictable at every turn, which I understand was most likely the point – James Mooney embodies the sarcastically-titled ‘mastermind’, as his poor foresight keeps running him into increasingly sordid corners and, unsurprisingly, his options slowly run out. While this might increase the film’s value as a piece of art (depending on which philosophers you subscribe to), knowing this still doesn’t make it a particularly exciting watch.
While there were certainly some missed opportunities and room for Reichardt’s The Mastermind to stretch its wings, it did have an undeniably interesting score and is yet another original comrade in the fight against Hollywood’s current sequel/remake obsession.
Tully is a Creative Writing and Film student in his second year at UNSW. He is happiest while reading Vonnegut or Carver and backpacking through exotic, mountainous countries without a return ticket. Often seen with headphones on, one can only guess whether he is immersed in Italian opera or hardcore punk.
