Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese's new movie Killers of the Flower Moon (𐓀𐒻͘𐓂͘𐓄𐒰 𐒹𐒿𐒰𐓆𐒼𐒰 𐓓𐒻͘𐒼𐒰 𐓊'𐒷𐓍𐒷) isn’t bad, of course, but it’s intensely frustrating. It’s a story told matter-of-factly, as if it’s information we need—almost clinical. As my companion said to me, it was like reading a book. All of this is sort of fine, although I think the movie takes a perverse pleasure in showing us violence: we didn’t need, for example, to see a sequence where Anna Brown was murdered after we had already heard her murder described to us in detail. That both of these sequences were given to us from the perspective of the men who murdered her is an odd choice indeed. 

The movie isn't emotionally engaging, because it continually refuses and frustrates our identification with the perspective of the Osage woman at the film's center. Here's an example of what I mean: When Molly's husband murder's Molly's sister in act two, we experience the murder through his eyes. He walks through the blown up house, he sees the dead bodies of the murdered people, and then he tells Molly that her sister has been killed. The camera looks down on her in the basement with her children. She hears the news and breaks down. It's devastating for her and it should be for us, too. But the camera? The camera stays up on the ground floor, looking down on Molly as she wails. It's as if it's all happening to someone else – which is exactly the point of view her husband has taken.

I also found the fire sequence very, very confusing. I didn’t understand what was supposed to be happening and I didn’t emotionally connect with what was going on. 

And then the film’s penultimate sequence, where we are for some reason in a radio play… there is nothing that could really explain this for me. I didn’t understand it either formally or thematically. (In fact, Killers of the Flower Moon up until this moment had been using silent film techniques to get across its exposition – the jump to radio-theatre is out of left field.) I just don’t get it. 

I quite liked the film’s final sequence with its return to the Osage nation. The film is at its best when it’s trying to tell the story from the Osage perspective, when it centers Molly and her sisters. If only Killers of the Flower Moon did that a bit more.