With The Mastermind, director Kelly Reichardt subtly plays with the expectations of the “heist film”, the film genre in which a robbery takes centre stage. However, the art theft around which everything revolves is remarkably unspectacular: no sophisticated planning or nerve-racking chases, but a clumsy, almost mundane act. And it is precisely in this banality that the tension lies…

The focus is on James Mooney (powerfully played by Josh O’Connor), a seemingly ordinary family man in 1970s America. As he steals paintings from a regional museum, the portrait of a man balancing between ambition and insecurity slowly unfolds. Reichardt focuses less on the crime itself than on the silences surrounding it: glances, gestures, the way Mooney moves within his family and towards his father.

In a warm, autumnal colour palette and against the backdrop of a politically turbulent era, The Mastermind becomes a layered study of masculinity, desire and self-deception. What begins as an almost comical robbery grows into a subtle tragedy about someone who wants to be more than he is and slowly loses sight of himself in the process.