Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon is already getting major Oscar buzz, but the film’s quality and Scorsese’s stature doesn’t mean it’s above criticism. Some of the Osage crew members themselves offered thoughtful critiques, the most prominent being that while Scorsese is an undeniable storyteller, the tale would be better told by an Osage artist from an Osage perspective.
That’s the thrust of the critique from Reservation Dogs star and writer Devery Jacobs, though her comments are even more pointed. After seeing Killers Of The Flower Moon, she posted her reaction on Twitter/X, calling the movie “painful, grueling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic.” She wrote, “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire. Imagine the worst atrocities committed against yr ancestors, then having to sit thru a movie explicitly filled w/ them, w/ the only respite being 30min long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”
Jacobs praised star Lily Gladstone and the other Indigenous actors as “the only redeeming factors of this film,” writing that “the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten” compared to the white antagonists. “I don’t feel that these very real people were shown honor or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths,” she wrote of the historic tragedy perpetuated against the Osage depicted in KOTFM. “Contrarily, I believe that by showing more murdered Native women on screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people.” She added that seeing “the way that film nerds are celebrating and eating this shit up? It makes my stomach hurt.”
Noting that the Osage had a hand in helping bring the film to life, Jacobs said she nevertheless “would prefer to see a $200 million movie from an Osage filmmaker telling this history, any day of the week.” Indigenous people “exist beyond our grief, trauma & atrocities,” the actor pointed out. “Our pride for being Native, our languages, cultures, joy & love are way more interesting & humanizing than showing the horrors white men inflicted on us.”
Jacobs concluded by acknowledging the real-life Mollie Burkhart and the many other Osage families who suffered from the Reign of Terror (“The pain is real & isn’t limited to the film’s 3hrs and 26 mins.”) “And a massive Fuck You to the real life, white Oklahomans, who still carry and benefit from these blood-stained headrights,” she wrote. “All in all, after 100 years of the way Indigenous communities have been portrayed in film, is this really the representation we needed?”
