Bearing the Consequences

Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind

The Mastermind (2025), Kelly Reichardt’s new film, has been characterized as playing with genre, “a heist flick for an arthouse crowd.”1 Her films are often associated with genres. Meek’s Cutoff (2010) is said to be an “indie western,”2 Night Moves (2013) an “anti-thriller,”3 and Wendy and Lucy (2008) a “road movie.” These are genres that have shaped the North American film landscape and allow viewers to orient themselves within it. Reichardt’s cinema thus moves in a space filled with familiar landmarks.

Yet the expectations raised by these genres are never quite fulfilled. A western promises fights between cowboys and Indians, but in Meek’s Cutoff, there’s mainly silent walking. Night Moves promises action and excitement, but the film is mainly about guilt and fear. There are no heroic stories Reichardt’s films, even though they deal with themes that are usually turned into spectacle. She o fffers a new perspective on the North American landscape that’s been colonized by Hollywood. Reichardt shows the vast emptiness that is iconic yet inhospitable. The characters find themselves in a world abandoned by the heroes from westerns, thrillers, and historical dramas. They feel somewhat deserted, standing in the middle of the vast parking lot of a shopping mall in a desert town. In The Mastermind, the main character, JB Mooney, seems to model himself on the art thieves he knows from the movies, but he doesn’t manage to follow their example.

The title is ironic and sets the tone for the film’s understated humour. Mooney, a furniture maker who once studied art history, lives with his wife and two children in a wooden bungalow in the 1970s. His wife goes to work every day, but there hasn’t been any sawdust in his wood workshop for a long time. During a family dinner, his father looks at him condescendingly; he should devote himself more to his role as breadwinner. Everyone, even his own children, looks at him and sees a good-for-nothing. Then Mooney gets the audacious idea to steal four paintings from the local museum.

Instead of the excitement of the perfect art theft and its smooth execution, we get the laborious preparations for an operation that goes wrong, and most of the film takes place during the aftermath. The shots are long and slow. In one continuous shot, we see Mooney in a hayloft, carefully packing the stolen paintings one by one into a self-made box, perhaps his most refined work in a long time. It’s a perfect box for storing paintings, and you get the feeling that it would be best if they stayed stored there forever, wrapped in the sheets that he so carefully had his wife sew, unaware of his reckless plans.

The shots don’t record actions that advance the plot but rather show exactly how things happen. A scene in The Mastermind is never just an illustration of the script: “Mooney climbs a ladder to the hayloft, packs the paintings into a wooden box, and accidentally drops the ladder. He jumps off the loft and lands in pig manure.” You could easily turn this into a short, funny scene, with each shot showing a piece of the joke. But although the situation is amusing, it’s also moving because Mooney doesn’t just perform the movements, he spends time. Reichardt is interested in the realism of the moment. In these long shots, the characters meet their fate. They are completely immersed in their own reality and inhabit the image rather than moving through it. Because they are not giving a “performance,” there’s room for doubt and for the expression of their silence. In Reichardt’s films, the actors can refine their performances most when they’re not speaking. It’s not just the text but also thoughts that are acted out. Reichardt’s characters often ask themselves: “What have I done?” “What have I gotten myself into?”

In that way, Certain Women (2016) revolves around the silences of its characters. As they drive through the landscape, their gaze offers a glimpse into their own lives. The women awkwardly try to chart their life paths, but in this film there also aren’t any heroic stories. The narrative structures in Reichardt’s oeuvre are not easy to characterize.

She herself calls her work “gathering cinema.”4 This term comes from an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin. Her “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” is a plea for storytelling as gathering, carrying, and preserving.5 She sketches a humorous Neolithic scene in which women collect berries and seeds in their carrier bags. In the evening, around the campfire, everyone talks about their day. The hunters’ stories are easier to tell than those of the gatherers; killing a mammoth is more exciting than a day full of small finds. Le Guin regrets that the hunter has come to tell the story. The structure of his story is an arrow shot from the beginning and “THOK!, hitting its mark (which drops dead).” And everyone has joined in telling a story like a well-aimed arrow in the mammoth’s brain. “But it isn’t their story. It’s his.” Le Guin’s proposal for “carrier bag stories” has a deep affinity with Reichardt’s stories. “A way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.”

Reducing a story to a conflict is ridiculous. And if you put a hero in a carrier bag, he becomes pathetic. The hero “needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.”

Mooney does indeed resemble a potato. He delights in his heroic art theft, but he lets everything go to ruin and is looked down on by his own family. His children collect facts and jokes, and Mooney lies to them with a potato face. The only moment when he’s sincere is in front of the stolen paintings by Arthur Dove. After unpacking the four works, he displays them in his living room. He even hangs one on the wall and looks at it, not only because he considers it an object of value, but also because the mystery of artworks intrigues him. The abstract forms appeal to him because they do not reveal themselves easily. The camera understands this and shows the paintings as they really are. They are shown as objects with an autonomous value, not as valuables, symbols, or carriers of meaning.

The camera work by her regular cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt strives for a consistent aesthetic. In preparation for their collaboration, a collection of references is regularly compiled from paintings, photographs, sculptures, textile designs or film stills, which are used to develop the visual style of each film. The way we get to see things, the grain, the light, the colours, the composition, also allows for a direct experience of the image, just as you might look at a painting.

In Reichardt’s Showing Up (2022), art itself plays a leading role. The film is a portrait of local Portland artist Lizzie, played by Michelle Williams, who has a job at an art academy and is preparing for a small exhibition. The screenplay was written with the work of contemporary artist Cynthia Lahti as a guide. Her fragile female figures made of ceramic with picturesque glaze are dreamy and deliberately unfinished. Lahti collaborated with Williams on new sculptures to teach her how to manipulate the clay so that it looks realistic when Lizzie is working in her studio.6

Showing Up demonstrates that creating art has nothing to do with a decisive moment of inspiration, like a bird landing on your shoulder and turning on the light in your mind. Rather, the work consists of caring for an injured pigeon, just like the artistic work Lizzie is trying to create. While she works on her sculptures, she also has to care for a pigeon that has been injured by her cat. Constant attention, being present; it’s about showing up for your work, every day again.

This is exactly what Mooney rejects. He half-heartedly prepares a robbery and passively accepts the consequences. The idea of caring is foreign to him. The art theft seems almost like a remedy for the endless boredom he feels as a husband and father. Thus, his escape becomes an escapade, against his better judgment. His fate resembles that of the character Josh from Night Moves. Unlike Mooney, Josh and his comrades acted out of political conviction. They are radical climate activists who blow up a dam, unexpectedly killing a camper. Josh, driven to the extremes by fear and suspicion, flees from his actions and his ideals, but his options for escape are increasingly limited. North America is big, but there’s no possibility of escape. Mooney’s future options are also increasingly limited, until a dead end comes into view. Reichardt’s films are mainly about the aftermath of events. They show how people suffer repercussions and how they bear the consequences of their actions.  

These consequences have a different weight in every era. The Mastermind is set in the early 1970s, where tranquillity seems to reign in the sleepy suburb where Mooney and his family live. The brown tones of corduroy, wood panelling, and Mooney's curls dominate the muted palette. The soft images have something musty, even suffocating about them. Reichardt describes this period as follows: “The ideas of the ’60s have been shot down and you’re in the ashes of that.”7 Mooney is unaware of this zeitgeist, which plays out at the edges of the image. During his wanderings, when he drinks a beer in the local bar, he doesn’t listen to the Vietnam veteran talking about how he developed PTSD. He doesn’t look up at the many posters trying to recruit soldiers. Sometimes he encounters pacifist demonstrators, but he looks down on “profiteering hippies” who refuse to serve, and feels no inclination whatsoever to join the army himself. Yet he is not exonerated from complicity in the Vietnam War, even if he’s only guilty of art theft.  

Although Reichardt’s characters aren’t always politicized, they all relate to a “historical moment.” In Meek's Cutoff, a group of settlers cross the American continent on foot to join a settlement, while in First Cow (2019), two immigrant men become friends in early capitalist North America. The two friends are found in the present day by a dog, who sniffs at the skeletons holding each other’s hands. In Wendy and Lucy, another dog travels with Wendy on her search for work during the financial crisis of 2008.

The everyday experience of a history in the making resembles personal fate rather than a major movement. Sometimes the characters hope to make history, sometimes they try to escape it, but often they are simply absorbed by it. They are tucked away in the big carrier bag, in the “belly of the universe.” Mooney, too, is ultimately overtaken by history, despite his naive excuses and the illusion of freedom now that he is freed from his family, his possessions, and his friends. From “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”: “We’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it.” Mooney steals an old lady's handbag, hides in the crowd of an antiwar demonstration, puts the money in his inside pocket, and secretly drops the wallet on the ground. Then two painful blows follow. The first: a demonstrator who approaches him to return his lost wallet. The second: the moment he says, “Hey, you dropped this...” he’s struck on the head with a police baton. The “this” splatters into warm blood spatters. Mooney constantly tried to escape his own fate. But the stain of his theft and his country’s scandalous war still mark him in this final scene. Together with demonstrators, he’s taken away in a police van. His last words are “But I didn’t do anything!” And he may be right about that.

• 1MUBI advertisement, “Reinventing the heist film: Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind”, The Guardian, 12 December 2025.
• 2Despoina Mantziari, “Women Directors in ‘Global’ Art Cinema: Negotiation Feminism and Representation,” PhD diss., University of East Anglia, 2014, p. 223.
• 3Eric Kohn, “Toronto Review: Why Kelly Reichardt’s Riveting Thriller ‘Night Moves,’ Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning, Is an Ideal Access Point For Her Work,” Indie Wire, September 2013.
• 4Nolan Kelly, “Kelly Reichardt,” Novembermag, October 2025.
• 5Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989).
• 6Min Chen, “Artist Cynthia Lahti Opens Up About Her Very ‘Particular’ Sculptures That Anchor the New Michelle Williams Film ‘Showing Up’”, Artnet, March 2023.
• 7Nolan Kelly, “Kelly Reichardt.”