Capsule Review of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

The Plot: The discovery of oil on Osage tribal land sets off a chain of murders in 1920s Oklahoma in director Martin Scorsese’s chilling non-fiction book adaptation.

The Verdict: A horror film disguised as a drama. The unjust outrage of the Osage murders stirs revulsion more effectively than an actual fright flick. Wolves found pictured yet again by Scorsese, who dresses up true crime as Caucasian radio theater while relocating the action from New York to Oklahoma.

The much-publicized script rewrite, now credited to Scorsese and fellow Oscar winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), only serves to foreground the bad guy yet again à la The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s the same Good Friday stuff, still not enough Easter Sunday, to paraphrase an oft-repeated quote — which is itself paraphrased — from Scorsese’s old parish priest. But it’s done so well that you can’t help but get on board with the fallen humanity.

Lily Gladstone, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, and William Belleau all deliver standout performances. Leonardo DiCaprio is on point, and this is probably Robert De Niro’s best work since Casino and Heat hit in the span of one month back in 1995. His character, the unctuous William King Hale, speaks Osage almost as fluently as the language of cutthroat capitalism. He has a bit of John Phillip Nichols in him, as if America learned nothing from its history and was all too eager to remake the Osage murders as the Cabazon murders.

Killers of the Flower Moon, available on PVOD today, is less CGI-offensive than The Irishman, and it shows more progress about balancing non-white-male perspectives. When real-life Osage Nation member Everett Waller speaks out in an emergency tribal meeting, it somehow feels like a retroactive attempt to unmute Anna Paquin and cinematically elevate hidden figures in American history.