“Killers of the Flower Moon” PEOPLE Review: Leonardo DiCaprio Stars in Martin Scorsese's Sinister Western

The true story of a criminal conspiracy against the Osage Nation, 'Moon' costars Robert De Niro and newcomer Lily Gladstone

Nearly two centuries ago, the historian Francis Parkman wrote that the fate of Native Americans had always been a forlorn and foregone conclusion: Indigenous man “will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together.” Director Martin Scorsese’s impassioned, fact-based Killers of the Flower Moon shows how those arts of civilization included greed, subterfuge, murder and the patience to put them all into practice — in the case of Killers, against one tribe in the 1920s.

This is the most sinister movie ever made about the West, and probably the most coldly pessimistic portrait of the American character since There Will Be Blood.

In the decades before World War I, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma had become rich — millionaire-rich — after oil was discovered on their lands. What could be more tempting to White ranchers (whose rolling acreage promised no such fortune) than to marry Osage women and gain control of their oil shares? This is what cattleman William Hale (Robert De Niro), the devil’s notion of a life coach, lays out as a plan of action for his aimless young nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), just back from the war.

Related: Martin Scorsese Says Leonardo DiCaprio Convinced Director to Let Him Play Villain Instead of Hero in Killers

Ernest becomes chauffeur to one of those rich Osage women, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). He woos her — clumsily, as he does most things — and marries her. She loves him, and he may love her, but it’s money that Ernest worships. And Mollie senses that. What she can’t know is that Ernest and his uncle are going to kill off her sisters, one by one. All those Osage oil claims will now flow toward Mollie.

And if Mollie herself should die prematurely...

The film is carried along by a slow, sickening undertow of suspense, made even more acute by Ernest’s bumbling attempts to hire hitmen competent enough to do the job. (Assassination out on the Plains is a brutal but imprecise science.) The tension only begins to slacken with the arrival of FBI agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons). White quickly puts together the case, as would have any trained, uncorrupted law man — if there’d been any in the vicinity.

DiCaprio, starring in his fifth film for Scorsese, isn’t quite right here: Ernest is a dumb, avaricious charmer, but as he begins to realize that his love for Mollie outweighs his desire to kill her (or perhaps simply equals it), DiCaprio signals moral growth mostly by thrusting out his jaw, as if he’d packed in too many wads of tobacco. On this point, then — as an ambiguous portrait of a marriage in which love and hate are perversely intertwined — Killers doesn't succeed.

But Gladstone, a Native American actress who recently appeared on FX’s Reservation Dogs, is extraordinary in the film’s most important yet also most enigmatic role. She has a tenderness, a wariness, a remoteness, at times a bravery — she joins an Osage delegation to Washington, D.C. to ask for an investigation into the murders in the community — and a cumulative tragic strength. Her Mollie is almost a land unto herself, shadowed by passing, shape-shifting clouds. Like Holly Hunter’s mute frontier bride in The Piano, she somehow exists outside and above the cruelties that threaten to crush and destroy her.

You may have heard that Killers is long — 3 hours, 26 minutes — and it moves at a grave, measured pace. But exactly how fast should a story of systematic genocide go?

Unlike Christopher Nolan, director of the year’s other great historic epic, Oppenheimer, Scorsese doesn’t try to create an invigoratingly, restlessly kinetic experience. Killer’s breathing rises and falls naturally, allowing Scorsese to lead us quietly into completely unexpected moments. A brief scene in which we see a dying Osage woman’s vision of the afterlife — she’s led away, laughing, into the forest — is one of the most beautiful, mysterious things he’s ever filmed.

Then, in an arrestingly strange coda, the director himself steps forth and, with a sad fatalism that  Francis Parkman might have appreciated, brings the saga to its close.  (In theaters Oct. 20, R)

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