Movie Review: Killers of the Flower Moon

Disclaimer: The film features a lot of grisly racial violence, and I decided not to shy away from describing it in this review, so I will talk about it at length.

Written on Friday, March 22, 2024

I finally finished watching Killers of the Flower Moon. I definitely had to watch it over a span of weeks, not even because it’s a three-hour-long movie but because it was a really intense and also unsettling movie. I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to watch it, but I saw the trailer and it looked incredible, so I really wanted to see it. Also, it was really empowering to see so many Indigenous actors and actresses on the big screen, especially Lily Gladstone, who won a Golden Globe for her performance as Mollie Burkhart in the film. To be honest, I hadn’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon before seeing this film, so even though I watched the trailer I didn’t know what to expect. And honestly, by the one hour and a half mark of the movie I had to step back and take a break because I was pretty emotionally shaken. But I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and reflected on my reaction, and I realized that I was supposed to feel uncomfortable while watching this movie, because the Osage murders were brutal and horrific in real life, so it would be a huge shame if the movie watered down or sugarcoated the lived horror and trauma that the members of the Osage Nation faced during that time period.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it takes place in the 1920s and William Hale is a wealthy white businessman who has several connections to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. His nephew, Ernest Burkhart, comes down to Oklahoma and works as a chauffeur, and he ends up driving an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle and he falls in love with her. Things seem to be going well, but within the first nine minutes of the film I saw several bodies of murdered Osage people with Mollie listing off the names of those murdered along with the listed cause of death. It was pretty sudden, and I remember nearly crying at the scene where the Osage woman is holding a baby, and a white man suddenly shoots the woman to death. It turns out that Hale is responsible for these murders, and he has Ernest work with him to plan and carry out the murders of several Osage people. Some of the people murdered are Mollie’s own family members, one of them being her sister, Anna. It was pretty hard to watch the scene where everyone is gathered around Anna’s body as the investigators do an autopsy because the autopsy was grisly. It reminded me of this movie I watched called Till, which is a biographical film about the lynching of Emmett Till and how his mother, Mamie, had his body put on full display for people so that they could witness how brutal Emmett’s lynching was. I knew that looking at Emmett’s body was going to be pretty hard to watch, but whenever they showed the body in historical movies about the Civil Rights movement, I would always look away. This movie doesn’t flinch at showing Emmett’s badly mutilated corpse, though. I had to see that though to know why what these men did to Emmett’s body was so horrific. And I think that is why I had to break up watching Killers of the Flower Moon in parts because it was hard to watch the racial violence done to the bodies of the Osage people.

I also was just really broken up about the trauma and pain Mollie went through in her marriage to Ernest. There is a particularly painful scene where he injects an entire bottle of insulin in her body, and she almost dies so she has to be rushed to the hospital. I broke down during that scene, and I was watching the film right before heading to work, so while I was in the office, that image of Mollie being poisoned just sat with me and it was painful. I looked up a photo of Mollie Burkhart, and honestly, I can witness the pain and trauma on her face because she lived through a really horrific time. There is a scene that really shook me, and it’s when Bill and Reta’s house is blown up and the investigators are going through the wreckage and they find their dead bodies (I watched a parent’s guide before seeing the film, so I knew it was going to be a pretty difficult scene to stomach, so I had to close my eyes.) When Ernest comes home and Mollie finds out about Bill and Reta’s murder in the explosion, she lets out a blood-curdling cry of grief and collapses on the stairs. And man, I was shaken and just wanted to cry with her. Grief is such a huge part of this movie because the Osage Nation lost so many people in these brutal murders, and it reminds me that’s why I need to study Indigenous history and be more aware because intergenerational trauma is very real. I am not a scholar in Indigenous Studies but I’m trying to read more books by Native America authors such as Tommy Orange, who wrote a really chilling and beautifully written novel called There, There, and the poetry of Joy Harjo, who wrote She Had Some Horses and Crazy Brave (many of these I didn’t find on my own, so I have to thank the people who recommended these works to me.) For the book club I was in we read a novel by a Cree Canadian author named Michelle Good called Five Little Indians. In the novel the characters are all survivors of the Canadian Indian residential schools, which were boarding schools in Canada that Native Canadian children were forced to attend in the government’s attempt to take them away from the ways and traditions of Indigenous Nations and assimilate them into the dominant white Canadian culture. I wanted to learn more about the residential schools, and so I watched an interview with survivors of these horrific schools, and it was very hard to watch and listen to them discuss these horrors that they went through because I don’t even remember learning about the Canadian residential schools in my history class, but I had to learn about it.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to handle Killers of the Flower Moon, but then I thought about my junior year of college, when I took a class on African American history. The summer before that, I had read a bunch of movie reviews about Twelve Years a Slave, and everyone talked about how horrific and harrowing the film was, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to stomach this movie. And then we had to watch the film for the class, and I had to go to my professor’s office hours and talk to him about my reservations about watching the movie. He gave me a very matter-of-fact, brutally honest (as it should be) talk about how yes, the film was going to show whippings and beatings of slaves and it was going to be brutal, but at the end of the day, Lupita Nyong’o and Chiwetel Ejiofor weren’t actually getting whipped. At the end of the day, they were actors telling a story. He also told me there was worse stuff to fear than watching a brutal movie about slavery. So, I took his word even though I was still pretty nervous to watch the movie, and it was hard to watch, but somehow, I ended up removing myself emotionally from the film and viewing it from an academic perspective. I watched the film four times, and frankly I don’t think it was great for my mental health, but I ended up writing a few papers on it for the class and hey, the acting was excellent, and everyone’s performance (and the film score) gave me goosebumps. Although I was pretty shook up after watching the baby-faced actor Paul Dano sing a racist song to a bunch of slaves and then proceed to have Chiwetel’s Solomon Northup hung from a tree and left to hang for hours until Benedict Cumberbatch’s “good slaveowner” character comes and rescues him (right before calling him an “exceptional [n-word]” and having him sent off to an even more brutal slaveowner named Master Epps, who Michael Fassbender played ruthlessly.)

I have to hand it to the cast and crew of Killers of the Flower Moon, and Martin Scorsese. This was a really powerful film, and by the end I was pretty emotional and shook, especially with the powwow dancing circle. It kind of symbolized to me that, of course, we’re not going to ever forget or move on from this kind of racial trauma because systemic racism is very much alive and well, but it was a reminder to me that Indigenous people and Indigenous traditions are still alive and well, and so I need to remember and not forget. In one part of the movie, when Ernest and Mollie are gathering up the children from the house explosion, Mollie yells that this is just “like Tulsa,” and I think she was talking about the Tulsa massacre, during which white supremacists murdered several well-off Black people and burned down businesses and homes in the Greenwood district in just a span of two days in 1921. Like I said, once I took the AP US History exam and left my textbook on the desk, all this history I studied flew out my brain. And that is really painful because I can’t just act like this kind of history isn’t important or that I can somehow forget it. Because what I learned from watching a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon is that history is never just a thing of the past. It affects multiple generations of people, and as a writer named Claudine Rankine said in her book Citizen, “the body has memory.” The body keeps score of all these distressing events, and it’s hard to just shake it off and call it a day. Trauma is real for a lot of marginalized BIPOC communities, and it takes years to heal from these wounds. But the fact that we have a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon shows that Hollywood is making progress in listening to the voices of Indigenous peoples and letting them voice their stories for a larger audience so that people can be more aware. And I need to give props to Martin Scorsese and the entire crew because clearly, they must have had to do extensive research, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro had to learn the Osage language as part of the dialogue in the film, which in my humble opinion is pretty incredible.