The Mastermind Cannes’ review: Kelly Reichardt’s film is about a sloppy robber who is haunted by others’ perceptions of his failure

British actor Josh O’Connor is having himself quite the festival, also featuring in the Oliver Hermanus-directed queer romance The History Of Sound, another Competition entry.

In this one, Connor plays an out-of-work carpenter who wants to switch things up by becoming a successful thief. Part of the film’s conceit lies in examining how failure impacts not just our perception of ourselves, but also determines how others perceive us: just the way commissions keep slipping out of J B Mooney’s hands, so does the heist that he plans.

The film opens, straight up, with J B casing the joint, so to speak. He is at a local museum, and has pinpointed a bunch of artworks that he wants to steal: the film suggests, without belabouring the point, that he may be a lover of art and genuinely wants to be surrounded by it in his modest home, in which he lives with his incredibly patient wife (Alana Haim, underplaying beautifully), and two excitable young boys.

Weighed down by inept conspirators, the plan is so incredibly sloppy — one goes off in between to do something monumentally stupid, the other has troubles of his own — that things go quickly south. J B hasn’t reckoned with a school holiday, so the two boys are on his hands; a couple of nosey teenagers are in the room when the heist is underway; guns are waved around; sleepy guards choose just that moment to become alert. Whatever can go wrong, does.

The Mastermind can be described as a heist-gone-wrong, but it is not as interested in the act of stealing itself, as it is in the robber.

JB has generational privilege. The suspicious cops who show up at JB’s house shed their belligerence once they know that his father is a respected judge. His well-dressed mother has enough money and residual affection to keep bailing him out, even when he goes on the lam, which he does without once thinking anything through.

You may be a white male in the US of the 70s, which was going through turbulent times — the Vietnam war, the posters with Uncle Sam asking able-bodied young men to join the services, the protests against drafts — but you will be run to the ground without continual support.

Old friends and their generosity are tapped unthinkingly, their joint pasts as art students revealing that J B’s criminal bent had an early start.

With his time running out rapidly, all we see is a man who could have been something, reduced to nothing: this is a wonderfully-judged performance from O’Connor, who never keeps a foot wrong as he goes through the film, as a selfish husband, careless father, and a wholly self-absorbed human, who can lie and cheat without once letting us hate him.