4 things to know before watching Killers of the Flower Moon
At Polygon, a lot of us are fans of sitting down to a movie with as little up-front information as possible, for the feeling of discovery. But sometimes, it helps to know a few things going in, whether it’s an interesting fact about the movie’s history, or just knowing how many end-credit scenes to wait for. Here are four things we think you should know about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon before watching.
No. Like most historical movies (Oppenheimerand Gran Turismo from earlier in 2023 come to mind), Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t the kind of story that would make a post-credits scene come naturally. There isn’t a next story to tease, a gag that needs a tag, or a character to check back in on for a little stinger at the end. Once the credits roll, the story is over — at least, the part of the story Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth wanted to tell. There’s certainly more to the real-life historical story, if you want to dig into the case that inspired the film.
He is! It’s just a brief cameo, like so many of his appearances as an actor, and his role is framed in an unusual way. This isn’t an Alfred Hitchcock-style director’s cameo, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where he’s off in the background, though. You won’t miss him when you get to that part of the movie.
Scorsese and Roth based the movie closely on David Grann’s New York Times bestselling non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. (The book was first published in 2017, but is now back on bestseller lists due to renewed interest caused by the movie.) Grann’s book was widely praised for its meticulous research into relatively little-known historical events, and the movie largely holds true to that
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