The diamantine City of London reflected down the long Thames; London’s familiar anonymity washed over me. I walked along Millenium Bridge, BFI to my left. All those lit rooms – all those lives – casting stones of light across the water made me feel hidden in plain sight. I can see them in spacious offices and flats; I am shrouded. I found difference in scale and opacity intriguing, and looking and interpreting are themselves powers. The pleasure of changing one’s angle of sight was something I came to recognise in the themes and methods of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind (2025).

Josh O’Connor’s J.B. Mooney is a vision of disaffection in his Massachusetts’ autumn. The season is fitting for the young father’s glaze-eyed determination, pitting secret exhilaration against a dulling marriage. Reichardt prepares the stakes of her ironically titular “mastermind” early. His wife, Alana Heim’s doleful Terri, is confined by an uncomfortable domesticity, comprising an art-school-dropout-cum-carpenter husband and precocious twins. Reichardt evokes this bind well: in an early scene, Terri casts a button as if into a wishing well, squeezed between 1970s cabinetry which we can only assume were hewn by her husband. Likewise, J.B.’s unkempt features and sleep-deprived pupils fidget in a physicalised crisis of masculinity.

Vietnam probed America’s moral order from this angle, (unequally) forcing tests of “bravery”, as a returning veteran in the film puts, while others retreated to apathy or objection. The Mastermind uses J.B.’s dilemma as a vector for moral break-down society wide. Postwar boom settling into sepia, J.B. is at historic cross-roads. Violence and national servitude were at once results of relentless industrial machinations and one edge of a paradox which engendered mass resignation. Discomfort at such a miss-matched demand was felt most strongly by the affluent, or by those for whom models of conscientious contravention were more familiar.

J.B.’s fingers slip into a glass museum cabinet and flirt with a carved Revolutionary War figurine. That the trick feels so easy gratifies and inspires him – with a host of nameless, aimless characters – to steal a series of abstracts by Arthur Dove. The thrill is obvious; it arouses him from grey domesticity as he hangs priceless artworks in his living room later. J.B.’s object is more than money; he silently clamours for more life, more impulsivity, as Dove’s entwined blossoms evoke. He takes, as compensation for small-town aimlessness, a covert wealth which is rich in imaginative potential. His desperation begs to transcend mediocrity, to be someone. Reichardt masterfully suspends Mooney’s muted elation in this intimate scene. She permits us access to a fantasy more loaded than black-market prices.

Rob Mazurek’s bee-bop bipolar scoring captures this conflict, an ever-present undulation which is harmonically destabilising. In the heist scene, the clamour of ostinati roars, while a mirage of clouds spins on the windscreen. The claustrophobic iterations of the baseline and synthy vibrations of pitched percussion draw from minimalism, capturing the film’s vintage. And Reichardt’s is a full-bodied vintage. At points, O’Connor is excessively made-up between crumpled Harrington, perfectly muddied sneakers and jeans which fit suspiciously well. The 16-mm production is broadly affected, so luxurious at points that it detracts from the immediacy of narrative impact.

The Mastermind is a dual undertaking, as pointed, wide-view commentary, constructed through the J.B.’s erraticism. It mirrors contemporary moral splintering and abandonment, exploring the strife of identity between misaligned effort and expectation. As drifting fugitive and mugger, J.B. flits across the States like a draft-dodger. The confusion of the few final shots indulges in stark contrast between prolonged, wide views and colliding lines. Shunted into a confined space, J.B. is anonymised again.