Killers of the Flower Moon review: Why Martin Scorsese’s new film starring Leo DiCaprio worth the long runtime

When you ask audiences to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour movie, you’re asking a lot. In that time, they could watch at least 68 TikTok videos.

There are few instances in which a filmmaker has both earnt the right for the ambition of an ultra-long film and actually go on to pull it off. Martin Scorsese is one of those talents, and with Killers of the Flower Moon, he justifies the runtime.

Scorsese luxuriates in the world-building of the true story of the 1920s Osage Indian Murders, adapted from David Grann’s book about a spate of killings in a wealthy Native American community after the discovery of oil on its land.

There could have been a version of this film in which Scorsese had been more economical. He might have sketched the same story in three hours, or two-and-a-half hours or even two hours, but it wouldn’t have been the same film. It wouldn’t have the same artistry, the same texture or the same rhythm.

The wizardry in Killers of the Flower Moon is in the moments and spaces in between the main plot points. It’s in the cadence of the dialogue, the verbal jousting between Leonardo DiCaprio’s hapless Ernest Burkhart and his much stronger willed uncle William King Hale, an oily and influential local cattle rancher played by an on-form Robert De Niro.

It’s in the knowing smile on Jesse Plemon’s face, as his federal investigator character Tom White starts to puzzle out the curious case. It’s in Lily Gladstone’s luminous and heart-wrenching performance as Mollie, an Osage woman who successively loses her family, doomed by their good fortune.

That’s why Killers of the Flower Moon is three-and-a-half-hours long. The difference, as always, in whether you’ll indulge such a demand on your time is if the work is good. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that.

Of course, there’s nothing simple about Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a thematically complex and visually rich epic that plays in a similar sandbox as Scorsese films including Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Departed and The Irishman.

It’s a gangster movie in another place, concerned with greed, power and the darkness in men’s hearts with De Niro’s Hale manipulating everyone around him for a grab at the Osage oil wealth. The key is how easily he succeeds, exploiting that sense of entitlement. And De Niro is never as charismatically menacing as he is in a Scorsese movie just as DiCaprio is never as sweaty as he is in a Scorsese movie.

In all seriousness, perspiration aside, DiCaprio’s nervy performance as Hale’s puppet, the nephew married to Mollie and “forced” to wrong her and her family, is riveting – a combustible mixture of guilt, weakness and internal conflict.

And then there’s Gladstone, an actor with incredible talent who has not had the opportunities she deserved after a superb breakout performance in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie movie Certain Women. When Gladstone is on screen, her magnetism is unwavering. It’s as if she’s baring the soul of the character she embodies and we can feel everything Mollie is feeling, all that loss, betrayal and strength.

If Killers of the Flower Moon was an hour longer and that extra time was just all Gladstone screen time, that would’ve been more than OK. Now with a lead role in a Scorsese film, it will be criminal if her career doesn’t rocket after this.

And then you have long-time Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker’s pacey editing and Rodrigo Prieto’s ravishing cinematography that at times feels voyeuristic. It’s a film in full command of its craft and its storytelling power.

That’s Scorsese’s mastery. He can conjure a fully fleshed-out world of compelling people and a lived-in place and demand you immerse yourself in it, even when it feels dirty (ahem, Wolf of Wall Street).

Not everyone will have the patience to be won over by Killers of the Flower Moon, but those people have the speedy distractions of TikTok.

Rating: 4 stars

Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas from Thursday, October 19