Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon arrived in 2023 carrying decades of expectation. Martin Scorsese adapting David Grann’s bestselling nonfiction book about the systematic murder of Osage Nation members in 1920s Oklahoma, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in the leads, was the kind of project that generated anticipation on its premise alone. The finished film is not what most people expected. Scorsese made a significant structural choice during production, shifting the focus from the FBI investigation that drives Grann’s book to the relationship between Ernest Burkhart and his Osage wife, Mollie. That decision shaped everything about the film and divided audiences in predictable ways.

The response has been strongly positive overall, with particular praise directed at Lily Gladstone’s performance and Scorsese’s willingness to tell this story from a perspective that centers the Osage experience rather than the white investigators who eventually intervened. The film received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress for Gladstone. The most common point of contention is the runtime. At 206 minutes, this is one of Scorsese’s longest films, and the pacing is deliberate even by his standards.

Lily Gladstone and the Weight of Witnessing

Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart is the film’s center of gravity. She plays a woman who loves her husband, watches her family members die one by one, and gradually comes to understand the scope of the betrayal being carried out against her people. Gladstone communicates all of this with remarkable economy. Her performance relies on stillness, on the intelligence visible behind her eyes, and on the way her body language shifts as the truth becomes impossible to deny. She does not play Mollie as a victim waiting to be rescued. She plays her as a woman of dignity and strength who is being poisoned, literally and figuratively, by the people she trusted most. The performance earned near-universal praise and made Gladstone a household name.

DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart is deliberately conceived as a weak, malleable man rather than a criminal mastermind. Ernest loves Mollie in his own limited way while simultaneously participating in the conspiracy to steal her family’s wealth. DiCaprio leans into the character’s stupidity and moral cowardice without making him a cartoon. The performance is uncomfortable to watch by design. Ernest is not a monster in the conventional movie sense. He’s an ordinary man whose greed and weakness make him complicit in monstrous things, and that’s harder to dismiss.

De Niro’s William Hale is the film’s most chilling creation. Hale presents himself as a friend and benefactor to the Osage while orchestrating the murders of their family members for financial gain. De Niro plays him with the warmth and avuncular charm that makes the character’s evil so insidious. Every kind gesture, every expression of concern, carries a predatory calculation beneath it. The performance draws on De Niro’s ability to project authority and trustworthiness, then slowly reveals the rot underneath.

Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography captures the Oklahoma landscape with a beauty that stands in pointed contrast to the ugliness of what’s happening within it. The wide, sunlit vistas become oppressive rather than liberating as the story unfolds, and Scorsese uses the visual language of the Western to subvert the genre’s traditional mythology. Robbie Robertson’s final film score, completed before his death, adds a mournful texture that deepens the film’s emotional resonance.

The Runtime and the Structural Gamble

Three and a half hours is a lot to ask of any audience, and not every minute of Killers of the Flower Moon justifies its place. The middle section of the film, where the conspiracy is unfolding but its full scope hasn’t yet been revealed, can feel repetitive. Multiple sequences of Osage family members dying or falling ill create a cumulative effect that is clearly intentional but also tests patience. Some viewers have argued that the same emotional and thematic impact could have been achieved in 150 minutes.

The decision to minimize the FBI investigation frustrated viewers who came to the film expecting a procedural. Tom White, the Bureau of Investigation agent played by Jesse Plemons, arrives late in the story and occupies relatively little screen time. Grann’s book builds significant tension around the investigation itself, and the film’s choice to reduce that element removes one of the narrative’s natural sources of momentum. The trade-off gives the film a different kind of power, but it’s a power that requires patience to appreciate.

The film’s ending includes a sequence that breaks from the main narrative in a way that surprised many viewers. Without spoiling the specifics, Scorsese makes a choice in the final minutes that explicitly confronts how stories about Indigenous suffering get told and who gets to tell them. The sequence is divisive. Some find it a bold and necessary acknowledgment. Others feel it undercuts the emotional weight of what came before.

An American Crime That Demanded This Scale

The Osage murders represent one of the most horrifying chapters in American history, a period when wealthy Indigenous people were systematically killed for their oil wealth while local and federal authorities either participated or looked away. Scorsese’s decision to tell this story through the intimate lens of a marriage rather than a crime investigation forces the audience to sit with the human cost in a way a procedural never could. You’re not watching clever agents solve a case. You’re watching a woman’s family be destroyed by people she lives with, and the slowness of the film mirrors the slow realization that the danger is coming from inside her own home.

The film also grapples with how complicity works at a societal level. The conspiracy against the Osage was not the work of a few bad actors. It involved doctors, lawyers, local officials, and ordinary citizens who benefited from the theft of Osage wealth. Scorsese is interested in how an entire community can participate in evil while maintaining a surface of normality, a theme that connects this film to his lifelong preoccupation with organized crime and institutional corruption.

Should You Watch Killers of the Flower Moon?

If you value ambitious filmmaking that tackles difficult history without simplifying it, this is essential viewing. Lily Gladstone’s performance alone is worth the commitment. The film rewards attention and patience with an emotional and moral complexity that few crime dramas even attempt.

Skip it if 206 minutes of deliberate pacing sounds like an endurance test rather than an investment. If you’re looking for a tight thriller built around an investigation, the film’s structural choices will leave you wanting a story it has no interest in telling.

The Verdict on Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese at 80, telling the story of a real American atrocity with the patience and craft of a filmmaker who has nothing left to prove. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro deliver some of their most unsettling work, but it’s Lily Gladstone who anchors the film with a performance of quiet devastation that earned her an Academy Award nomination. The 206-minute runtime is a real commitment, and the deliberate pacing will challenge audiences accustomed to tighter crime narratives. What Scorsese builds with that time, though, is something few other filmmakers would even attempt: a portrait of systemic evil that refuses to let its audience look away or find comfort in simple moral categories.