The Mastermind is a quietly subversive heist film that’s not really about the heist at all. Arthouse itself.

Set in 1970s Massachusetts, the film follows J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor), an unemployed carpenter who devises a plan to steal modern artworks from the fictional Framingham Museum of Art. Director Kelly Reichardt blurs fact and fiction throughout: the museum’s exterior was filmed at the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, while the interior galleries were constructed inside a warehouse. Into this fabricated setting, Reichardt inserts real artworks, including a Henry Moore sculpture, lending the scheme a documentary credibility that quietly undermines its criminal fantasy.

The film oscillates between drama and deadpan comedy, stripping the heist genre of glamour. Alana Haim plays Mooney’s wife, a largely silent, watchful presence whose restraint grounds the film emotionally.

Sound plays a similarly ironic role, with jazz punctuating the action scenes, giving the would-be caper an offbeat rhythm that emphasises awkwardness over suspense.

Culminating in a dryly ironic ending, The Mastermind becomes a subtle portrait of disillusionment at the close of the 1960s, a moment when ideals curdle into frustration (Vietnam War and Nixon’s era) and grand dreams shrink to modest, sometimes absurd gestures. Minimal, wry and deeply humane, the film captures the quiet collapse of an era as much as it does the failure of a single man.