The Mastermind is a brilliantly frustrating anti-heist movie that defies expectations, and it's one of my favorite movies of the year

The Mastermind may be billed as a heist movie, but that categorization does the movie a disservice. If anything, director Kelly Reichardt's latest is an anti-heist movie, with the heist being almost entirely beside the point: instead, she invites us into a historical moment not so dissimilar from our own to wonder just what the purpose of art is in times of upheaval. A rush of tension in the first 30 minutes or so quickly dissipates, and we're left to chew on the anticlimactic aftermath for the rest of the runtime. You'll either find it frustrating or brilliant.

Josh O'Connor, who's pulling double duty on the film festival circuit at the moment for The Mastermind and new Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man, stars as James "JB" Mooney, a man who's swapped a fledgling career in academia for a life as America's most useless househusband. Unlike his art thief character Arthur in last year's La Chimera, JB isn't motivated by love or beauty, though – it's ego and greed, and instead of tragedy we get subtly deadpan comedy in another standout turn from O'Connor.

Set in the early '70s against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam War protests, there's an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness in the air. It's in this climate that JB, listless, bored, and broke (and thoroughly uninterested in his wife and two young sons), decides to steal four paintings by abstract modernist Arthur Dove from his local suburban Massachusetts art gallery.

Not according to plan

JB isn't going to steal the paintings himself, of course: he's the titular "mastermind" behind the scheme (heavy emphasis on the inverted commas). I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that nothing really goes to plan for JB, and the rest of the film is concerned with the aftermath of the heist, a slow, ambling unravelling that takes JB across the country but no further away from his problems.

Reichardt has long been interested in people who turn to the wrong side of the law and their reasons for doing it: First Cow saw two men in 19th Century Oregon start a business using stolen milk, Night Moves follows radical environmentalists in the aftermath of a risky protest, and in Certain Women, Laura Dern plays a lawyer whose client, disabled by a workplace injury, takes a security guard hostage at his former company. With The Mastermind's JB, she's delving into perhaps her least sympathetic protagonist yet.

A vaguely mischievous jazz score idles away in the background of the film, always on the verge of something but never quite getting to its climax – a bit like JB and his grand plans. One scene, which has been the subject of a few bemused Tweets and Letterboxd reviews, sees JB painstakingly hide the paintings in a barn loft, taking each one carefully up a precariously balanced ladder. "Not even joking there’s a scene where the guy is climbing a fucking ladder for 10 minutes I can’t stress this enough do not go see this movie unless you are in need of a solid nap," one disgruntled viewer wrote on Twitter. JB goes to great lengths, not just in that moment, but throughout the film, but to what end? It's a quietly confronting scene that's a microcosm of the rest of the movie, one that almost teasingly asks us: what's the point?

This woman's work

Another criticism of the movie I've seen online claims that Alana Haim is "underused" or "wasted" as JB's long-suffering wife Terri, which again strikes me as missing the point. JB isn't particularly interested in her, so she remains on the movie's periphery. We don't even see her face in the movie's extended opening sequence, really, because JB is too focused on the gallery's Dove paintings rather than his family, who he's visited the museum with.

Gabby Hoffman's Maud, the wife of a friend JB visits later in the film, is afforded a similar level of regard: the men in The Mastermind don't have much to say to the women in their lives unless they want something from them, and the women just have to get on with it, for the most part. All of this just goes to paint an even more unflattering image of JB, a character we are not particularly meant to empathize with.

The movie's final shot, which I won't spoil, is particularly farcical. In the moment, it's ironically comical, but I found the closing image stuck in my head even after I left the theater (as the endings of Reichardt's movies are wont to do). Drawing particular attention to the futility of JB's ambitions and his impotency in the face of both his own circumstances and society at large, Reichardt seems to be wondering what the point of doing any of this is as the world falls apart.

The Mastermind doesn't signpost us to any particularly straightforward answers on that front, and it may well be saying that there's no point at all, but that doesn't mean it's not a question worth asking.

The Mastermind is out now in US theaters and arrives in UK cinemas on October 24. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.