I really love Kelly Reichardt films. Even the ones that don’t seem to be about anything, like Showing Up (2022), somehow draw me in with the beauty of moments and the delicate journey of quite ordinary characters.

So I had high hopes for The Mastermind, particularly as it stars Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim. O’Connor plays James, a family man who we find out very little about other than he is a chancer. And not someone to rely on.

He is the mastermind of a plan to steal art from a local gallery, and as this is the 1970s it is a pretty low tech plan. He seems to have no moral compass, using his wife Terri (Haim) and two children as pawns in his grand schemes.

The art direction is pleasingly mid, describing a pretty ordinary 1970s. Alana Haim is stoic as his wife, but is given barely any lines of dialogue and seems to be there simply as a device to help us understand James‘s lack of empathy or care for another human being.

It’s one of those stories where the main character is unlikable and they make bad decision after bad decision. Do we care? I found myself being irritated more than fascinated and couldn’t wait for the film to end. Sorry Kelly.

Afterwards I kept thinking about why this didn’t engage me in the way that Showing Up did. They are both about people who aren’t particularly likeable, who are so caught up in their own lives and needs that they can’t really meet the needs of those around them. With James though, it felt like he was promising so much, exploiting the good will and kindness of the people around him without any care for anything by himself. I didn’t feel quite the same about Lizzy in Showing Up, where we got a sense of where her frailties may have come from. Maybe I was able to empathise with her better as she was another middle-aged woman like myself.