You don’t go the distance Martin Scorsese has without knowing a thing or two about the transcendentally intimate craft of filmmaking. Indeed, he may have started more than a few fires with his comments on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there’s absolutely no denying that Scorsese, in all his years perfecting his directorial technique and his ever-incisive commentary on the dark side of the human experience, deserves all the respect in the world.
With that in mind, it’s hard to say how many more movies the legendary filmmaker has in him; at 80 years old, to say nothing of the rapidly-changing cinema culture that no longer favors his bread and butter anymore, the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon could very well end up being Scorsese’s swansong. As painful a possibility as that is, the film’s new teaser has given us every reason to believe that, if true, his final swing for the fences will be textbook Scorsese in the most delectable way.
A dramatized adaptation of David Grann’s 2018 non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the film follows the investigation of the series of murders of the Osage Native American tribe that took place in 1920s Oklahoma, and the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and Tom White to get to the bottom of this heinous, greed-drenched conspiracy. And for a filmmaker that’s built himself on picking apart humanity’s evils, whether satirically or straightforward, this sounds like a story that was destined to land in Scorsese’s hands.
The film marks the seventh collaboration between Scorsese and DiCaprio, who plays the treacherous Ernest Burkhart, and the eleventh between Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who portrays the villainous William Hale. Elsewhere, Lily Gladstone looks set to steal the show as Mollie Burkhart, while Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, and John Lithgow also star.
Killers of the Flower Moon will release to select theaters on Oct. 6 before a wider cinematic release on Oct. 20. It will later stream on Apple TV Plus on a yet undisclosed date.
