I was NOT properly informed NOR was I prepared for this movie because what did I just watch? When I saw Killers of the Flower Moon and all the interviews from the cast and crew about this movie, I thought this was just gonna be another historical creative non-fiction about the Indians in America and how they came to be. So tell me why a whole family was wiped out in the most careless and gruesome way possible and all the perpetrators outlived the only member of that family who escaped the conspiracy.
Ok, let me try and make this make sense.
Killers of the Flower Moon tells us of how this minority group called the Osage were supposedly driven from their former homes and came to settle in this new land where, by some luck from heaven, they found oil, pure crude, which made the people so rich that they didn’t have to work for anything again.
screenshot from probook
But as with natural resources, (and every good thing if we are being honest), comes enemies, in this case, the Americans, who started to filter into the land and take over where they could, mostly by marrying the daughters of Osage men so that the 'head rights'(which is all their family's wealth), would come to them when they die, and make no mistake they were dying, from what they called the 'wasting sickness', which was essentially poisoned whiskey curated by these Americans.
The crux of this movie focuses on Mollie and her family, which was one of the few families who still had their head rights, and how she is wooed into marriage by Ernest Burkhart, an ex-military who just came back to stay with his uncle William Hale, who is known as the King of Osage Hills. (p.s he is an American, not an Osage [side eye]).
screenshot from probook
Now everyone in Mollie's family starts dying one by one as if ticking them off a checklist. One sister dies from the ‘wasting sickness', another gets shot in the head, another dies in an explosion with her husband, and her daughter dies of a whopping cough. Even Mollie herself was sinking slowly into oblivion every day after being diagnosed with diabetes. Like I said checklist. Only for her to find out that the person behind it and all the other deaths in the land was the person she and her family trusted the most.
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This movie bothered me a lot. The level of greed, the love for money, the conspiracy, the lies, the gullibility, the betrayal, the triviality of deaths,( like people were being found dead with headshots and knife wounds and everyone just carried on as if nothing happened).
The movie is phenomenal I mean you can't expect any less from Martin Scorsese, although I think I enjoyed it this much because I went in relatively blind, which is not typical of me,(I don't like suspense, sue me!!!) and it amplified the experience. it's one to watch at least once.
also, I'm making it a point to watch all the movies and animations nominated for an Oscar this year(the ones available on online platforms anyway), this is because I wanna give feedback on a win or loss based on my own experience of the movie. So far Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Nimona, and Across the Spiderverse are done, Society of the Snow was a masterpiece, also a true life story, so look out for my review on that one, and keep this page in mind when you wanna rant about a movie.