I remember the smell of wet wool in a Leicester Square theater during a midnight screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It wasn’t the chainsaw that stayed with me. It was the background noise. The generator humming while people died. The mundane sound of machinery indifferent to human terror.
Watching the final trailer for Kelly Reichardt‘s The Mastermind, I heard that sound again.
There are no chainsaws here. Just the scrape of a canvas being peeled from a frame in broad daylight. But make no mistake—this is a horror movie. It’s just one where the monster is your own mediocrity coming to eat you alive.
“James, we’ve been told you’re mixed up in this robbery at the museum.”
The line is delivered in the trailer not with a shout, but with the flat, devastating bureaucratic tone of a school principal. And that’s the terror. Josh O’Connor stars as JB Mooney, an unemployed carpenter in 1970s Massachusetts who decides to rob an art museum. Not because he’s a criminal mastermind. But because, frankly, he has nothing better to do.
I have to admit something: I usually get bored by “vibes-based” cinema. You know the type—films where people stare out of windows for two hours to signify longing. But Reichardt does something different here. She weaponizes the boredom.
Watching O’Connor in this trailer, stumbling through a heist that goes “haywire” not with explosions but with awkward silences, I felt a knot in my stomach. It’s the same feeling I get watching The Shining before the ghosts show up. The horror of a space that is too quiet. The museum isn’t haunted by spirits; it’s haunted by the crushing weight of expectation.
The Anatomy of a Quiet Collapse
Reichardt has always been the poet laureate of American failure (First Cow, Wendy and Lucy), but here she’s doing something sharper. She’s dissecting the “Rebel Without a Cause” archetype. Mooney isn’t cool. He’s a “simple man” whose life unravels because he tried to script his own movie, only to realize he doesn’t know the lines.
And look at who she’s surrounded him with. It’s a murderer’s row of indie royalty:
The casting of O’Connor is particularly brilliant—and painful. He’s having a hell of a year. If you look at the industry right now, he’s got this dropping on Mubi at the exact same moment Rian Johnson‘s Wake Up Dead Man hits Netflix.
It’s a fascinating double bill. In Johnson’s film, he’s likely playing to the rafters. Here? He’s playing a vacuum. A void.
There’s a specific shot in the trailer—Mooney and two cohorts wandering into the museum. They don’t look like Ocean’s Eleven. They look like kids who broke into a school after hours and are suddenly realized they have to pee. It’s tactile. You can practically smell the floor wax and the stale cigarette smoke on their jackets.
I argued with myself while writing this. Is it fair to call a “contemplative art heist drama” a horror film? Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I just find the idea of being an amateur art thief in a “sedate corner of Massachusetts” terrifying because it implies you have to live with yourself after the adrenaline fades.
When the theft proves easier than holding onto the art, Mooney is relegated to a life on the run. But what is he running from? The cops? Or the silence?
The editing in the trailer cuts to release tension, only to replace it with something worse: the realization that nobody cares. The world continues. The sun sets. The refrigerator hums.
You know that specific panic when you realize you’ve ruined your life, but the birds are still singing outside like nothing happened? That. That is this movie.
What This Means for The Industry
- The “Slow Cinema” wave is evolving into “Anxiety Cinema.” Reichardt isn’t just observing anymore; she’s tightening the screws.
- Josh O’Connor has secured his place as the heir to the Philip Seymour Hoffman throne. He plays “uncomfortable” better than anyone working today.
- Mubi is beating the streamers at their own game. By releasing this alongside Netflix’s heavy hitters, they’re counter-programming blockbuster noise with deafening silence.
- The 70s setting isn’t just aesthetic. It’s a mirror to our current aimlessness—a time when the big causes were dead, and people were just left drifting.
FAQ
Why does The Mastermind feel scarier than a traditional thriller?
Because traditional thrillers promise a resolution. A killer is caught; a bomb is defused. Reichardt promises nothing but the slow, agonizing erosion of a man’s soul. That’s a threat you can’t run from.
Is knowledge of Kelly Reichardt’s previous films (First Cow, Certain Women) required?
No, but it hurts more if you know them. If you’ve seen Old Joy or Wendy and Lucy, you know her characters rarely win. You go into this expecting tragedy, which turns every mundane moment in the trailer into a ticking time bomb.
How does Josh O’Connor’s performance compare to his role in Wake Up Dead Man?
They are polar opposites. In Wake Up Dead Man, he is likely part of an ensemble puzzle, a piece of a machine. In The Mastermind, he is the machine, and the machine is broken. It’s the difference between watching a firework and watching a candle burn out in a sealed room.
What is the significance of the “museum in broad daylight”?
It strips away the romance of crime. Most heist movies use darkness to hide the act, making it mysterious. By doing it in broad daylight, Reichardt exposes the clumsiness, the awkwardness, and the banality of the crime. It’s not cool; it’s just sad.
