Film Review

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) — Scorsese’s western of greed and guilt

In 1920s Oklahoma, white men scheme to rob the oil-rich Osage tribe of their newfound wealth…

At the start of Killers of the Flower Moon, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives in Oklahoma to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro). Freshly discharged from the US Army after World War I, Ernest is earnest, simple-minded, and leafing through a children’s book about the Osage Indians…

The book’s caption asks the reader “Can you find the wolf in this picture?”, and by then the audience has likely guessed that the wolf in this picture is going to be Hale. So when Ernest tells his future wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), that Hale is “a nice man”, it reveals more about Ernest’s naivety and his fate than it does about Hale’s true nature.

Killers of the Flower Moon deals with one of Scorsese’s favourite subjects (crime) and explores one of his favourite themes (guilt). But it has more in common with The Irishman (2019) than with his earlier, more rambunctious crime sagas like Goodfellas…