Film review: Killers of the Flower Moon is rich, insightful and complex

L-R: Robert DeNiro and Leonardo diCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon

• Killers of the Flower Moon
• ★★★★★
• Cinema release

In the early 1920s, the Native American Osage people were, per capita, the richest individuals in the world, this by virtue of the oil discovered beneath the Osage reservation in Oklahoma. 

Killers of the Flower Moon (15A) opens with Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arriving in Oklahoma to work for his uncle, William ‘King’ Hale (Robert De Niro), a cattle rancher who has always been a great friend to the Osage.

A war hero and an inveterate womaniser, Ernest soon settles down when he meets Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a ‘full blood’ Osage and a wealthy woman from a family that seems cursed by premature death.

But it’s not only Mollie’s family: all over the reservation, men and women are dying inexplicably, leaving behind the rights to their oil.

Written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, with Scorsese directing, Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic neo-Western — almost three-and-a-half hours long — that exposes the dark underbelly of the American Dream as the old pioneer spirit once more rides roughshod over the Native American people.

It’s a slow-burning story, certainly, but a burn that gradually becomes a raging tour-de-force as Roth and Scorsese lay bare the almost pathological greed for power and money that drives the White Man to betrayal, deception and systematic murder.

De Niro turns in his best performance in years as King Hale, who is Iago-like in his malign ability to manipulate those who consider themselves his friends, and DiCaprio is equally impressive as the dim-witted Ernest, a weak man whose ridiculous posturing grows ever more sinister, with Lily Gladstone superbly understated as the cynical, ironic Mollie.

Don’t be put off by the run-time: Flowers of the Killer Moon unfolds like a thriller, albeit a thriller rich in psychological insight and wrapped in a complex emotional web.