The Mastermind -- A Review
Brb gonna go watch Challenger (Orignally published November 5th, 2025)
Tonight, I went to a screening of The Mastermind at AMC. It was a 7:30 pm showing on a Saturday night at the AMC inside of the Century City mall. I went by myself for three reasons: 1) I needed to use my A-List. 2) I needed to have something to do on a Saturday night besides drink or rot in bed. 3) Josh O’Connor is hot. I was unaware that the “Live Q&A” portion of the screening would be as “live” as it was. Like they pulled out two chairs and the director, Kelly Reichardt, sat in one of them. I’ve been to my fair share of Q&As and even been on a panel or two. Usually I find them boring. I never have a good question to ask and the whole thing is either fan service (which I do approve of just don’t want to engage with) or it’s masturbatory.
My issue with this particular movie and this particular Q&A is that I should not NEED the Q&A. Why, by the end of the movie, could I hardly name a single character? And it wasn’t in a purposeful way like Queen and Slim or Fleabag. I literally could not remember any of the characters names because there was probably a dozen pages worth of dialogue in this 2:20 long movie. Artistically there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but not even the jazzy score could save the rhythmless pace of the movie. The irony is that I remember in the Q&A they talked about plot and rhythm. I don’t remember what they were saying though because I zoned out and was reading Letterboxd reviews to see if anyone else felt as unmoved by this work as I did. The questions I wanted to ask were: What are the names of all of the characters? Why did he steal those paintings? Why was the movie so long? What’s Alana Haim like? Is Josh O’Connor single?
It was neither a subversion of a heist movie or a heist movie. It was shot neither intimately or starkly. But by gosh they definitely shot something. There was one scene where I watched Josh O’Connor go up and down a ladder three times. He carried paintings up in two trips. Then he carried up the box. I don’t know why I watched that. It didn’t tell me anything about the character. The scene was shot from maybe two different angles. One showing the bottom of the ladder and one showing the top, and it just cut between the two. It was like watching a vlog. You pay a camera man. You pay a DOP. Make them work!
This movie assumed I’d care. They assumed wrong. Media is not entitled to an audiences attention. You have to earn it. At one point they try to give Josh O’Connor’s character motive by saying he stole the paintings for his old professor. This is revealed well into the second act by the wife of a friend who shelters him while he’s on the run. The most interesting this about this women was that she was played by the actress who plays Adam’s sister Caroline in Girls. Nothing about Josh O’Connor’s character struck me as a guy who tries to impress or has any interest in art. I couldn’t wager a guess as to a single thing he cares about. Not his wife. Not his kids. Not the money. You can’t make me care about someone I don’t know. Sure, I care on an esoteric level, but you’re asking me to pay attention for two and a half hours. You better damn well give me something to think about. I’m done caring about directionless white men. At the very least I’m done caring about them for no reason other than them being directionless.
The opening credits were probably the most interesting part. I know perhaps this is the important part, according to fans. The movie is set up to look like a heist movie. Then it “subverts the genre”. Josh O’Connor is looking extra thief-y and unassuming, and a random kid is yammering on and on. Security guards are looking particularly incapable, and Alana Haim is there. The scene breathes. The scene slithers and sneaks. It gives the audience so much to chew on and wonder about. Who are these people? Do they know each other? What are they doing? The framing is retro and geometric. The deftness of Josh O’Connor unlocking the cabinet and slipping the figure into his glasses case will feed me for days. The reveal that it is somewhat of a family affair was titillating. I was riding that high for the first half hour until I realized it wasn’t going to get any better. The air was so stale as I watched it, that when people would laugh at something I would get angry. For a movie that took itself that seriously to be getting cheap laughs— I may as well have had a dunce cap on. Kelly Reichardt was really taking the piss.
What a waste of Alana Haim. I first saw her in Licorice Pizza. I enjoy PTA as much as the next girl. I recently saw his new movie One Battle After Another which was beautiful and funny and enjoyable even thought I knew it would be enjoyed more by others— notably those who are more Cinephilic or male than I. In this movie, she had virtually no lines. She had virtually no substance.
My chief annoyance, after seeing the Q&A and reading the Letterboxd reviews, is that those who enjoyed the film enjoyed it for overly heady reasons. The Mastermind defenders describe it as “cozy, gentle, heavy” ;“A systematic and silly dissection of the lonely man seeking purpose archetype” ; “Funny and a good time” ; “Anti heist: a portrait of small gestures and silences that accumulate until they form something tragicomic”. It was cozy in the same way that watching a blanket for two hours is cozy. The intrigue for these people seems to be in the backstory, perhaps sometimes even the CREATION of a backstory. They seek to find meaning in all things. To the filmmaker, aspiring filmmakers, and the film obsessed, the beauty of the five-going-on-fifty minute scene of Josh O’Connor going up the ladder was that the paintings and the box were heavy irl. The simple act of capturing what he naturally did, given the task at hand, is apparently intrigue enough. Sometimes it is, but this time it was not. The purpose of storytelling is in part to guide the audience. Actually, that may be the entire job. I’ll also scoff at spoon fed narratives, but the notion that I MUST assign meaning to every element of a movie in order to appreciate it does not a good movie going experience make. I kept wondering “What is going to happen next” (derogatory).
Among artists, and even among my other 20-something friends, people love to talk about “the art of noticing the little things” or “finding beauty in the details”. The quotations on those phrases surely make me seem like an overworked career woman in a Hallmark movie right before her father dies and she has to go back to her hometown to sell the farm where she meets a farmhand and he shows her what life is all about. I’m not immune to beauty or gratitude. I am, however, wary of those rhetorics. I think people use them as an excuse. They use them as an excuse to shame viewers. It says maybe you just weren’t perceptive enough to get that this is a reference to this obscure short film I watched in film school. In college (and beyond) it felt like an excuse for laziness. It was possible to defend any choice. When I couldn’t choreograph another minute I repeated. I didn’t repeat with reason. I repeated because I couldn’t be bothered. When anyone asked, I spewed something about letting the viewer marinate on the material. You have a job to do as a creative, so do it and do it well. So many people would kill to make movies and I get angry when it gets wasted. When the equipment and the money gets wasted on another passionless, masturbatory, two-plus hour long movie about nothing. Touch grass.
I am a loyal fan of all things Hank and John Green and am subscriber to their newsletter called We’re Here. In a recent letter John talked about “The power of generous audiences”. He said:
I’ve been thinking lately about how books, videos, and other forms of art need generous audiences. When I first read The Great Gatsby in high school, I ABSOLUTELY LOATHED it. Looking back, the problem was not Gatsby but its reader, who could not summon the generosity of spirit to imagine the characters with much richness or complexity, despite there being plenty of nuance on the page.Meanwhile, mediocre art can be made great by a reader/viewer who arrives willing to share their deepest selves with the story. In fact, I think the definition of great art is maybe, “Something made great by the vulnerability and care of an audience.”
I know I was not the most generous of audiences this time. Perhaps in due time I will be able to summon the generosity of spirit to also see this movie as “a patient character study on a man’s desperate and pathetic existence”.
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