The Mastermind: Making an Art Heist Gloriously Mundane 🖼️👮
Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt, The Mastermind launched in late 2025 and is an unusually sedate heist film. Famously, it hit cinemas just before the October 2025 Louvre heist in Paris where eight pieces of French Crown Jewels were stolen in broad daylight.
It stars King of Indie Films Josh O’Connor as an everyday salary man planning to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from a local museum. The fallout from this takes a mundane path and subverts genre norms in an always engaging manner.
OMG Crime is Boring in The Mastermind
Set in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1970 the story follows the unemployed carpenter James Blaine “JB” Mooney (Josh O’Connor). He’s married to Terri (Alana Haim), has two young kids, and leads a very normal suburban American existence.
Reichardt deliberately wrote Mooney to be kind of a blank sort of character. He’s not unlikeable, but he’s not likeable either. He’s just unassuming and an apparent drifter through life going through the motions.
Seemingly due to boredom, he suddenly hatches a plan to steal four paintings from a local art museum. Unbeknownst to his family, he starts testing the security measures at the premises ahead of the heist.
He plans it all out, hires some thieves, and the robbery takes place in successfully bungled fashion. He gets the paintings, but one of the robbers threatens a security guard and is arrested soon after.
Mooney then has to start fending off the investigations by the FBI, before an organised crime outfit kidnaps the mastermind and has him frogmarch them to the location of the paintings (covered in hay, in a box, at a farm).
His wife, meanwhile, heads off with their kids to stay at their parents. Mooney then goes on the run from US law enforcement.
If you think of the brilliant Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and how two people robbing a bank turned into a media frenzy, The Mastermind is the exact opposite. There’s some newspaper coverage of the stolen art, but otherwise the crime is solved quickly and the perpetrator is left to bungle his way through the rest of the film.
That’s what we particularly enjoyed about it, how Reichardt’s writing strips away any glamour surrounding crime and makes it all look incredibly mundane and cumbersome.
Based on that, we can see why some people haven’t liked the film as not very much really happens (some YouTube reviews called it “boring” and “pretentious”). But that’s kind of the point, it’s a bumbled burglary that leads a hapless guy into a mass of nothingness for no reason.
One part is an exploration of male apathy and how a bloke thinks he can outsmart everyone else, doesn’t, then continues to try anyway as his situation worsens.
Yet it’s also notable protests against the Vietnam war can be seen throughout the film, but Mooney isn’t part of any of that. He’s entirely focussed on himself. It makes The Mastermind a keen, slow-paced exploration of individualism VS collective action. Not for everyone, then, but we thought this was great.
The Production of The Mastermind
Reichardt loosely based the plot on the May 1972 robbery of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The robbers hid the paintings in a bizarre location and were caught soon after. However, this is more like an anti-heist film with the way it plays out.
Josh O’Connor was the instant pick for the lead role. He really is the King of Indie Films. His turn in the excellent comedy-drama La Chimera (2023) by Alice Rohrwacher was matched by a brilliant turn as the sleazeball Mr. Elton in Emma. (2020).
The film was shot in the US across various locations. The museum depicted in The Mastermind doesn’t exist, though, it was a shot at the front of Cleo Rogers Library in Columbus, Indiana. The library was done up inside to make it look more museum-like.
It premiered in Cannes back in May 2025 then launched in cinemas from October 2025 and made $2 million at the box office. It’s another one destined for cult classic status, we feel, as who’s to say what’s wrong with sedate cinema? Next, we need a mundane psychological thriller.
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