Killers of the Flower Moon Review: Scorsese's Epic is a Devastating American Crime Story

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a monumental, harrowing, and essential American epic that uses its immense runtime to dissect a foundational sin with unflinching moral clarity.

Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth initially drafted a script centered on the FBI investigation, a more straightforward procedural. Leonardo DiCaprio, originally cast as Agent Tom White, pushed for a seismic shift. After meeting with the Osage Nation, Scorsese realized the true story’s heart lay not in the lawmen who arrived late, but in the corrosive, intimate evil within the community. The film became a story about a marriage—the union of the weak-willed Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and the resilient Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone)—poisoned from within by the greed of his uncle, the monstrously charming cattle baron William King Hale (Robert De Niro). This choice transforms the film from a mystery into a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, where the audience knows the killers from the start and watches, horrified, as the trap slowly closes.

Why is Lily Gladstone’s performance so celebrated?

Her work is the film’s soul. As Mollie, Gladstone communicates volumes through stillness, a wary gaze, and subtle shifts in posture. She portrays a woman navigating immense wealth, systemic racism, and profound personal loss with a dignified resilience that makes her eventual betrayal all the more heartbreaking. In a film filled with loud, performative evil, her quiet suffering resonates the loudest. This performance rightly earned her a Golden Globe win and made her the first Native American nominee for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her chemistry with DiCaprio is unnervingly believable, which is the film’s central, tragic mechanism. You must believe in their love for the horror to fully land.

DiCaprio fully commits to Ernest’s pathetic, conflicted nature. He’s a man so morally vacant he can profess love with one breath and plot murder with the next. Robert De Niro delivers one of his most chilling Scorsese turns as King Hale, a villain who cloaks his genocidal avarice in the language of friendship and Christian charity. The supporting cast, filled with talented Native actors like Tantoo Cardinal and Cara Jade Myers, provides crucial texture and humanity to the Osage community Scorsese painstakingly recreates.

A master director working at the peak of his powers

Scorsese’s direction is patient and assured. With cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, he captures the Oklahoma landscape in all its stark beauty, the oil derricks standing like metallic grave markers on the prairie. The period detail is immersive, from the elaborate Osage clothing to the clattering Model Ts. Editor Thelma Schoonmaker masterfully controls the grim, escalating rhythm, letting scenes of domestic life sit alongside acts of shocking violence. The late Robbie Robertson’s percussive, blues-inflected score provides a relentless, anxious heartbeat.

The film’s 206-minute length is its most debated aspect. It is long, and its pace is deliberate, mirroring the slow, insidious nature of the conspiracy. Some may find sections demanding. Yet the cumulative power is staggering. This isn’t a thriller about whodunit, but a horror about how and why it was allowed to happen. The final act, where the Bureau of Investigation finally arrives, feels almost like an epilogue to the main event—the systematic erasure of a people.

The film’s most brilliant and controversial choice is its coda. Scorsese himself appears in a radio play epilogue that directly confronts the way Hollywood has historically turned Native suffering into entertainment. It’s a bold, meta-textual moment that forces the audience to reckon with their own role as spectators to this tragedy. It’s a reminder that this story, and thousands like it, were buried for decades.

Financially, the film was a loss for its backers Apple and Paramount, failing to recoup its massive budget. Artistically, it is a towering achievement. It was met with widespread critical acclaim, scoring a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and ten Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. It stands as a late-career masterpiece for Scorsese, a grim companion piece to The Irishman in its meditation on corruption, complicity, and time’s relentless march.

Where does it rank among Scorsese’s films?

Killers of the Flower Moon belongs in the upper echelon of Scorsese’s filmography. It lacks the propulsive energy of Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street, but replaces it with a heavier, more sorrowful gravity. Its closest relative is perhaps Silence, another epic about faith under siege. It is a film of immense formal control and profound moral anger, a history lesson that feels terrifyingly present. It is not an easy watch, but it is an indispensable one.

For more on Scorsese’s legendary career, explore our guide to his greatest films. The film is now available to stream on Apple TV+.

Sources

• Killers of the Flower Moon - Wikipedia
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Box Office Mojo