Film / Killers of the Flower Moon

Greed is an animal that hungers for blood.

"Please send help. They're murdering Osage and the police do nothing."

— Mollie Burkhart

Killers of the Flower Moon is a 2023 American epic Western crime drama film co-written and directed by Martin Scorsese, and based on the 2017 non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jesse Plemons, Lily Gladstone, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, and Robert De Niro. It is also the first major wide theatrical release produced by Apple Original Films, with Paramount handling distribution.

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Native American tribe of Osage County, Oklahoma, become ludicrously wealthy after oil is found on their land. A flood of white Americans migrate to Osage County in hopes of getting their own piece of that fortune by any means necessary, culminating in a wave of mysterious deaths that eventually attracts the attention of the federal government. Thrown in the middle of the bloodshed is Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), whose loyalties to his Osage wife Mollie (Gladstone) and wealthy landowner uncle William Hale (DeNiro) will be tested mightily in the midst of this "Reign of Terror".

Killers of the Flower Moon was released in theaters on October 20, 2023. It was released on Apple TV+ on January 12, 2024. Scorsese and DiCaprio have also been confirmed to be following up this film with an adaptation of another non-fiction book of Grann’s, The Wager, about a shipwreck turned mutiny among the crew of the titular British ship in the 1740s.

Previews: Teaser, Trailer

Despite the similar titles and sharing the same premise, the film has nothing to do with Moonflower Murders.

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Killers of the Flower Moon contains examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny: Mollie is initially bemused by Ernest's attempts to strike up a conversation with her, until she calls him something in her native language and his response—"I don't know what you said, but it must've been Indian for handsome devil"—gets a genuine laugh out of her.
• Adaptation Title Change: Downplayed; the film kept the original book's title but omitted its subtitle, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
• Adapted Out:
  • Tom White is the closest thing to a protagonist in the original book; a full chapter is devoted to his backstory as part of a Badass Family of Texas lawmen, and much more emphasis is placed on his efforts to solve the murders. Those details are almost completely removed from the film, and White's reduced to a supporting character.
  • W.W. Vaughan (a lawyer for one of the victims who was killed himself and was the second confirmed non-Osage victim of the plot) is absent, and is instead rolled into a Composite Character with William J. Burns and other private investigators who were hired by the Osage and their allies but either were bribed or misled.
  • The infamous BOI/FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is a major part of the book but is The Ghost in the movie, only getting a single mention by name.
  • There were other Native American tribes in the area who were entangled in the Osage murders; for example, a woman who was coerced into providing a fake alibi for Anna's death was a member of the Kaw. In the film, the only non-Osage Native American is John Wren, a BOI agent who claims to be an Osage as part of his cover but in real life was part-Ute.
  • The film reduces Hale's He Knows Too Much killing spree to setting up Acie and Blackie to get shot in botched robberies and cutting Henry Grammar's car brakes. It omits Al Spencer and Curley Johnson, two outlaws with knowledge of the conspiracy who had also died, Spencer in a police shootout (which may not have been related to Hale) and Johnson from being poisoned by industrial alcohol.
  • There were several other murders that took place even after Hale was convicted, but the film implies much of the plot ended with his imprisonment.
  • The last third of the book is mainly set in the modern day, tracking how the Osage's oil wealth eventually dried up, the boom towns shut down, and the descendants of the dozens of victims are still haunted by the murders' legacy generations later. This conclusion emphasizes Grann and the Osage's belief that Hale was the fall guy for a much broader conspiracy against the tribe and that many more people were involved in Inheritance Murder killings of the Osage, something that is only hinted at in the film proper.
• Ambiguous Situation: Just how much of Ernest's guilt is genuine remorse out of what he's doing to the Osage, how much of it is because white people get hurt, and how much of it is because he's a war veteran? The biggest sign of regret is when Bill and Rita are killed in a bombing, and though it's clear he's shellshocked and has a horrible look of agony as he watches his wife break down, he still continues to poison his wife on Hale's orders.
• Anger Born of Worry: When Mollie starts to refuse to take the insulin, thinking she's being poisoned, her argument with Ernest descends into a shouting match in which he angrily mocks her and her heritage for preferring superstition over Western medicine, though he soon calms down and apologises, and his obviously genuine concern for her health convinces her to take the insulin. At this point, Ernest is unaware that the insulin actually HAS been poisoned on Hale's orders, and was an innocent dupe in this part of the scheme, though his sincerity doesn't last.
• Artistic License – History: One of the Osage elders describes the conspiracy against them as genocide. The term, while accurate for a 21st-century audience, did not come into use until The Holocaust.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: "I don't like whiskey. I love whiskey."
• Bait-and-Switch Compassion: Done so many times it's almost funny. Every time the conspirators seem to genuinely care for an Osage tribesperson, they are revealed to be only lining their pockets.
  • Hale shows concern for Roan, who suffers from suicidal tendencies, trying to steer him away from booze or violence. In reality, he has a life insurance policy out on Roan, which is voided if he is murdered, and only cares about him being alive to cash in.
  • It's unclear how much Ernest really knows about the conspiracy until later in the film. As a result, many scenes with Ernest and his wife are rife with this. For example, one scene has Ernest and Hale eating lunch with Mollie, explaining to her how the P.I. she hired to investigate Anna's death likely pocketed her money and ran off. Ernest killed the P.I. himself. And took the money he'd been paid.
• Bank Robbery: A few, fitting the end of the "Wild West".
  • Acie Kirby's successful one using dynamite to breach the safe is what gets him hired to blow up Bill Smith and Reta's home.
  • Blackie Thompson attempts one after receiving a tip from Hale. It's a setup that gets Blackie arrested and the rest of his crew killed.
• Based on a True Story: The film is a dramatic adaptation of a nonfiction book about the real events portrayed.
• Bilingual Bonus: A lot of dialogue is spoken in the Osage language. Some of it is subtitled, but most of it isn't.
• Bittersweet Ending: Bordering on Downer Ending. Ernest finally decides to come clean about his uncle and tells the court (almost) everything after his daughter dies, and both are sentenced to life in prison; Mollie divorces Ernest and finds love with another man, and the Osage nation survives despite Hale's prediction of their imminent demise. However, Mollie has lost most of her family including her young daughter and dies a few years later of diabetes, while Hale and Ernest get released from prison early and both live to old age. Multiple other Osage with no connection with Hale had their murders go unsolved, and the nation soon lost most of its oil wealth. Even the radio show expositing that Mollie Burkhart married again and implied she had a better marriage, the format deliberately treats the epilogue with commercial flippancy.
• Black Comedy: The extreme heaviness of the movie is occasionally lifted by moments of such sheer absurd evil that one can't help but laugh.
  • Ernest confronting the undertaker over the "Osage prices" he is being asked to pay for his sister-in-law's funeral, questioning why she is being given an open casket when the coroners removed her face, and asking him to avoid the usual practice of stealing all of the Osage's jewelry... so that he can steal it himself.
  • Ernest is punished for his role in getting Blackie arrested by being taken to his uncle's Masonic lodge and... being spanked with a giant paddle.
  • The thorough botching of Roan's staged suicide, in which his drunken killer shoots him through the back of the head, takes the murder weapon, and gives it back to Ernest. Ernest and Hale's panicked reaction serves to further emphasize just how dumb these killers are.
  • Kelsie Morrison is arrested for asking a BOI agent undercover as an insurance agent, in the most unsubtle way possible, whether it was legal for him to kill his two Osage stepchildren for their headrights. When pressed on this later in court, he insists he would never kill a child... unless he could get away with it.
  • The film's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue is a period-accurate true crime radio show featuring some creative foley and orchestral Stings, Large Ham performances, and some truly insensitive instances of Lucky Strike cigarette product placement. The fact that this horrific tragedy is reduced to a piece of unserious entertainment is equal parts funny and infuriating.
• Book Ends: The film begins with an Osage elder lamenting that his people's culture will die and their children will grow up as white people. It ends with actual footage of modern day Osage people performing a ceremonial chant.
• Compressed Adaptation: In reality Hale went through two trials, the first for the Smith family bombing where Ernest confessed and pled guilty but Hale wasn't convicted and the second for the murder of Henry Roan which convicted Hale and Ramsey. In the film both events take place at the same trial.
• Corporal Punishment: Hale, a high-ranking Freemason, spanks Ernest with his Masonic paddle as punishment for getting Blackie jailed.
• Creator Cameo: Martin Scorsese delivers the poignant final lines of the film in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue as he reads Mollie's obituary - which, he somberly intones, made no mention of the murders of her family members.
• Criminal Procedural: Like many of Scorsese's movies, though this film focuses on a different kind of organized crime. His choice to follow the perspective of the criminals is a marked departure from the format of the original book, which is more of a Police Procedural and Law Procedural; these elements only emerge in the film's last act and are largely Out of Focus.
• Cruel Coyotes: Mollie, who is Native (specifically Osage), initially associates her husband Ernest with coyotes for his charm and obvious lust for her wealth. It becomes far less of an Affectionate Nickname as the true breadth of Ernest's crimes against Mollie's family and people become known to her over the course of the film; in their last meeting in the film she uses it spitefully, confirming her views on his cruelty.
• Dead Guy Junior: Mollie and Ernest's youngest child Anna is named for her deceased aunt.
• Death of a Child: Little Anna Burkhart tragically dies of whooping cough. The news is delivered by Agent White to her imprisoned father and grand-uncle, causing the greatest show of remorse and grief thus seen from the former.
• Death Wail: Mollie lets out a truly gut-wrenching cry when she learns that her sister was killed in a bombing. Ernest lets out a similar one later on when he learns of his daughter's death.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: All throughout.
  • A Native man remarks, "You're more likely to get charged for kicking a dog than killing an Indian." Besides the Osage's outright murder, they are referred to as savages, forced to get white "guardians" to access their own finances, and held to different medical standards.
  • Hale's preferred term for African-Americans is the hard N-word.
  • Blink and you'll miss it, but the Ku Klux Klan marching in the same parade as a Native veterans group is treated as a normal sight.
  • The radio show at the end turns Mollie's dialogue into stereotypical Tonto Talk.
  • The term "greedy Jew" or just "Jew" is thrown around casually.
  • A doctor suggests alcohol as a remedy for "melancholy" (though Hale at least seems to recognize this is batshit; even then, he supports it so the resulting murder looks like a suicide).
• Drums of War: An ominous drumbeat can be heard in the teaser as the tension between the Osage and everyone else is ramped up.
• Dying Dream: While lying by a creek with her family, Lizzie sees an Osage warrior in full regalia accompanying two old Osage (presumably her parents). Beaming ear to ear, she stands and walks off with them before the scene cuts back to her living family mourning her passing.
• Dying Race: The only justification Hale gives for murdering the Osage besides pure greed is that they're dying out (so, presumably, why not just kill them for their money too?). Of course, they aren't (and weren't) dying out either, but Hale cites this claim to Ernest.
• Epic Movie: With a total run time of 3 hours and 26 minutes, an enormous cast involving some of the biggest names in Hollywood, a sprawling story that covers many years and touches on heavy themes of racism and greed, and multiple scenes involving dozens to hundreds of extras on screen at once, this film easily qualifies as one of Scorsese's most ambitious.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Ernest's homecoming is one big one for Hale.
    • When Ernest addresses him as "sir", Hale insists that he call him "king", like Ernest did when he was a child, which goes to show his massive ego and infantilization of his nephew.
    • Later on, when the two men are chatting, Hale asks Ernest a series of questions that seem friendly and avuncular, but are ultimately meant to determine Ernest's usefulness to him.
  • Tom White gets one later in the film, when he first chats with Hale. Hale is trying his usual persona, attempting to foist blame for his scheme on the Klan and then simply blaming the Osage deaths as "bad luck." White, for his part, listens quietly, and when he finally pipes up, he tells Hale that the situation seems "more like an epidemic than bad luck," undercutting the older man in a subtle way and showing that he's not buying what Hale's selling.
• Family Extermination: The Kyle family is slowly whittled down by disease and Hale's actions, with Mollie's sister and mother dying of 'wasting disease' and her other two sisters (as well as their husband) are murdered on Hale's orders. Hale attempts to have Ernest poison Mollie's insulin and it's implied that he did something similar to cause the 'wasting disease.'
• Foreshadowing:
  • In many Amerind cultures, the Coyote is at the very least a trickster figure, and just as often is a Anti-Hero as he can be a sinister, thieving, bottom-feeding thug. Mollie and her sisters call Ernest a coyote in jest, knowing he's after the money, but as the movie drags on, Ernest grows more and more brazen in his thefts and his uncle's murder plots.
  • Mollie's sister died of a 'wasting disease' no one knew the cause of. She's later hit with the same 'wasting disease', courtesy of Hale and the Shoun brothers poisoning her insulin.
  • Mollie is warned by the state rep controlling her government allotment to get her diabetes in check, and she simply smirks and nods her head. As the film progresses, her diabetes gets worse, which not only gives Hale an in to poison her by tampering with her insulin, but also allows the rep enough plausible deniability to deny her funds on account of her "condition".
  • Hale notes that the Osage rarely live past the age of 50. In the end, it's revealed that Mollie died at 50 years old.
• Gold Digger: Ernest and Bill Smith are just two of many seen throughout the film. Since the Osage's access to their money is often dependent on having a white "guardian", they tolerate the high number of white men and women who seek to marry into their wealth and accept their proposals, though not without complaining of how many of their white spouses are lazy at best and potentially dangerous at worst.
• Grave Robbing: Some white men perform this on Osage graves as one way of making a quick buck. Ernest even does this to his own sister-in-law after his brother kills her.
• Greed: A core theme of the film.
  • Bill and Ernest are just two of countless white people who dehumanize and victimize the Osage in order to gain material wealth for themselves, going to ridiculous lengths and killing their own kin in the pursuit of money. The streets of the Oklahoma boom towns are littered with white people transparently seeking to swindle, rip off, or marry wealthy Osage.
  • For their part, the Osage leaders themselves note how the oil money has eroded their old cultural values and placed the tribe in a vulnerable position.
  • The original book emphasizes that the endemic greed in the region was partially systemic in nature. U.S. law at the time required the Osage to have white "guardians" to access their money, leading to the Osage's tolerance of white people's presence and their high levels of intermarriage with the "buzzards" seeking to leech off their wealth. The roots of the greed on display in 1920s Oklahoma thus is rooted in the original sin of white people's greed for Native Americans' land.
• Headbutt of Love: Ernest and Mollie share several, most prominently when they first reunite after Ernest's arrest and Mollie's recovery.
• Hesitation Equals Dishonesty: When Mollie asks Ernest what he was giving her, it takes him a long time before he's finally able to say, "Insulin." She knows, at that point, what kind of man he really is.
• Historical Hero Upgrade:
  • While the leg of the BOI investigation shown in the film was effective, the movie leaves out the fact that it only happened because J. Edgar Hoover was caught in a scandal involving Blackie, who was released from prison in hopes of becoming an informant for the FBI and instead decided to start a crime spree. He had tried to cancel the investigation and hand it over to the State authorities, where it would likely have been buried, but the public outcry forced him to continue the case. In addition, Hoover deliberately rushed the investigation and pinned all the blame on Hale when it was likely that the conspiracy ran far deeper than just Hale.
  • The film implies President Calvin Coolidge directly intervened in the Osage case when begged to by Mollie during a trip. It was possible she had been part of the Osage travelling to DC, but there are no records of her speaking to Coolidge; the Osage had to practically bribe the feds into investigating, and if it hadn't been for a scandal involving the BOI, J. Edgar Hoover would have turned it back to the State.
• Honest Corporate Executive: Barney McBride, a prosperous oil driller who operates on the Osage land, is willing to help them appeal for official help in investigating the murders on their reservation. This gets him subjected to a brutal Make an Example of Them murder.
• Honey Trap: After determining that Ernest is not useful to him intellectually or physically, Hale determines that Ernest would work best as one of these. This is downplayed, however, since Ernest meets and courts Mollie on his own, albeit with Hale's "encouragement."
• Hope Spot: After the house bombing, Rita is shown lying seemingly untouched on the floor. When someone tries to lift her up, the back half of her head falls off with a nauseating squelching sound.
• Inheritance Murder: What Hale's scheme to gain the Osage Headrights amounts to: him arranging male relatives to marry the daughters of Lizzie Q, then arranging to have the daughters murdered to ensure that their fortunes would be inherited by his family upon Lizzie's death. It is all but outright stated that Hale's endgame was to have Ernest killed after he'd killed Mollie, thereby ensuring that the entire fortune would go to Hale alone.
• Insurance Fraud: While Hale's biggest crime is his long-term planned Inheritance Murder of Lizzie's family, he makes extra money in the meantime with plenty of insurance fraud schemes, from burning his own fields to taking out an insurance policy on his debtor Henry Roan (a depressed and suicidal man who was likely to kill himself with or without Hale's intervention). Ernest attempts to get in on the action when he hires Blackie to steal his car for the insurance money. Ironically, these schemes and not the murders are what ultimately leads to both men's downfall; Blackie is initially arrested and sent to prison for car theft, and one of the BOI agents goes undercover as an insurance agent to get dirt on Hale.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: The BOI put Ernest under physical and psychological stress by keeping him standing in the interrogation room for a full night, but they already had all the information they need by that point and just needed to weaken his resolve to get him to agree to testify. However, when Ernest reneges on testifying, he is instructed by Hamilton to lie that he was beaten and tortured into giving a false confession.
• Karma Houdini: Byron is never convicted, and thus gets off scott-free. Ernest and Hale receive life sentences but are paroled and live to old age, although Ernest is consumed by guilt and Hale spends the rest of his life lamenting the failure of his scheme.
• The Klan: This is a curious time in Ku Klux Klan's popularity. They proudly march in a community parade right alongside Native American groups. Hale greets one of their leaders cordially even though he's publicly known as a friend of the Osage. Behind closed doors, however, Hale attempts to use them as a scapegoat to deflect attention away from himself after viewing newsreel footage of the Tulsa Race Riot.
• Ludicrous Gibs:
  • The Shoun brothers hack Anna's body to pieces post-mortem to destroy evidence.
  • After the Smiths' house gets bombed, Hale stumbles on some severed fingers in the grass, which prompts someone to blandly tell him they've been picking up pieces of the maid for hours.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Mollie's mother Lizzie Q mourns the Osage bloodlines being diluted by her daughters' white husbands. On the flipside, Mollie's in-laws coo that their grandson is white-passing, unlike his more visibly mixed sister.
• Misplaced Wildlife: The owl that appears in both Molly's delirious visions and her mother's is a Eurasian eagle owl being used as a stand-in for American great horned owls. Granted, these are hallucinatory visions rather than encounters with a real wild bird, but the Osage would almost certainly not hallucinate European owls!
• Neglected Rez: Played with. In the early 20th century, the small Osage nation was the wealthiest on Earth on a per capita basis, with that wealth being fairly evenly distributed among the tribe's people rather than concentrated to a narrow elite. As a result, those living on the reservation lived in total luxury for a time. However, as their leadership points out, the Osage only live on this remote oil-rich land in the first place because the U.S. government forcibly relocated them to the worst land imaginable shortly before oil became valuable. The tribe endured many years of poverty before the oil was discovered, were forced to surrender individual access to their money to U.S. oversight, were killed and stolen from with impunity by white American thieves with no help from the U.S. for years, and eventually lost most of that oil wealth.
• Not Me This Time: The Tulsa Race Massace occurs partway through the movie, which sparks speculation from some in the community that the Ku Klux Klan might be behind the murders. Of course, the main purveyor of this theory is William Hale, who has good reason to shift suspicion elsewhere, and the Ku Klux Klan are largely irrelevant to the story despite holding a march through the town at one point. It should also be noted that Mollie’s wealth guardian is both the local Klan chapter’s grand wizard as well as a jury member during Hale’s trial.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The first time Burns' attack is shown, his attackers' faces aren't shown. The second time the attack is shown, his attackers are revealed to be Ernest and Byron.
  • The first time, it's heavily implied, but not outright shown, that Byron killed Anna. The third act shows her murder.
• Police Are Useless: As the local sheriff is in Hale's pocket and complicit in the killings of Osage natives, no investigation is made into the murders until the bodies pile so high that the government is forced to send the Bureau of Investigations under Agent Tom White to look in to it. Even they are stonewalled at every turn by uncooperative locals and conveniently missing evidence, and come off as ineffectual at best. This is then stunningly averted when it is revealed that White and his team had Hale figured out from the start, and had secretly been building a case behind the scenes to bring him down.
• Psychopomp: Some Osage who know they're about to die see a vision of an owl flying into their room shortly before it happens, such as Mollie's mother and eventually Mollie herself. This is thankfully subverted in Mollie's case, as she gets rescued from death's door by BOI agents before she can succumb to the poison and survives the events of the film.
• Rags to Riches: The Osage Nation suddenly became very wealthy after massive oil deposits are discovered on their land, allowing them to achieve prosperity in a way they've never had before.
• Retraux:
  • Early in the film there is a fake newsreel showing how the Osage Nation became extremely rich due to the discovery of oil on their land. It's shot to look like a 1920s newsreel, complete with silent movie-style text cards.
  • Scenes in colour were mostly shot with modern film in modern cameras, with low-light scenes shot on digital. The footage was then all colour-corrected to give four distinct looks based on old film stocks, changing according to the time period shown and the mood of the scene.
  • Scenes in black and white were shot on black and white film, in director Martin Scorsese's very own hand-cranked 1917 model camera.
• The Reveal: While it's obvious to anyone with a knowledge of Native American history that Ernest isn't going to be a good guy from the get-go, and his uncle schmoozing him into marrying an Osage woman solely for her money for a scheme tipping off those that don't have that knowledge, that he really isn't the man Mollie thinks he is gets progressively revealed to anyone who missed it:
  • Ernest's brother takes him on a robbery spree, mugging Osage for their jewelry at gunpoint.
  • Ernest anxiously overseeing the fake car robbery meant to be a prelude for a murder.
  • Finally, the private investigator Mollie personally hires is beaten, possibly to death. A later scene shows that Ernie spearheaded the attack. After this, the movie leans far harder into Ernest being inextricably intertwined from Hale's scheme.
• Self-Deprecation: The end of the movie is capped off by a radio play obviously meant to represent the film on a meta level. It plays fast and loose with the facts, turns real-life human beings into flattened caricatures, is casually racist by giving the Amerind dialogue broken English, and is under heavy Product Placement^note Killers of the Flower Moon was produced by Apple. Martin Scorsese himself appears to deliver the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue and thus the final lines of the movie, willingly placing himself into the crosshairs of criticism in the event the movie, no matter how well-meaning or well-researched it is towards Indigenous people, ends up being another example of exploitation of their pain and tribulations.
• Shirtless Scene: The film opens with several Osage men shirtless and triumphant bathing in an oil gusher.
• Significant Background Event: Around the time the BOI arrive in town, the film keeps cutting to an out-of-town Native American man who keeps showing up to the same locations as our main characters. As it turns out, he's one of the BOI investigators and was talking to the local Osage to get leads on the murders.
• Sinister Minister: At one point, due to Mollie's paranoia, it is left ambiguous as to whether the concern the local Catholic Priest has for Mollie in her confession is genuine or sinister. It winds up being averted when the BOI Agents confirm that the reason they are investigating Ernest and wish to question Mollie is because the Priest tipped them off to Mollie's behavior out of concern for her safety. In Real Life Mollie's priest was one of the very few white people to believe her when she said she was being poisoned.
• Smoky Gentlemen's Club: Hale is a high-level Freemason, uses the lodge as a type of headquarters for planning his crimes, and uses his connections to other powerful Masons to keep himself out of trouble.
• The Sociopath: Most of the men involved in Hale's plot to kill the Osage, both named and unnamed, show no guilt or regret for killing Osage just for their money. This can largely be attributed to their racism, with the killers all viewing native people as subhuman to some degree. However, this bigotry exhibits itself more as a horrifyingly banal detachment than an outright hatred. Hale and his goons are outwardly friendly to the tribe, even marrying and raising children with Osage women, only to rob from and kill them without a hint of guilt.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Hale's solution to prevent Bill Smith from inheriting another the wealth of two of Lizzie's daughters: to kill him and his wife Rita simultaneously, so that the wealth transfers to Mollie and Ernest instead of Bill Smith's family and so Rita can't remarry or go into hiding. The only "foolproof" way he can think of to do this is to blow up their home while they sleep, fully throwing aside any pretense that Mollie's family isn't being targeted. This backfires massively, bringing the federal government's attention to the reservation.
• Til Murder Do Us Part: Ernest doesn't want Mollie dead, but he's willing to put her through hell, kill every other person she loves, and poison her into a near catatonic state in order to get her family's inheritance. When it seems like she's on death's door, he merely lessens the dosage of the poison and seems to resign himself to her death's inevitability, and only the intervention of the BOI ensures that she is able to recover.
• Tonto Talk: The radio drama recapping the Osage murders at the end gives stereotypical accents to the Osage characters even though we've seen that they had the exact same Oklahoma accents as their white neighbors.
• Twilight of the Old West: Set at the very end of what could be considered The Wild West. The wealth of the Osage means there are more cars around the reservation than horses, but the area is so remote (and the authorities so corrupt) that conditions are just as unruly and dangerous as they had been for decades... until the federal government steps in at the very end, essentially slamming the door shut on the era.
• Uriah Gambit: When the feds come down to solve the murders, Hale tricks Acie and Blackie into committing blatant crimes in order to get them both killed to ensure their silence. Blackie manages to survive to testify against Hale; Acie isn't so lucky.
• Wham Line: "What did you give me?"
• What Happened to the Mouse?: We never find out whether the beating William Burns (the private detective) got from Ernest was fatal or not. Most likely not, since the murder of a white man on the reservation would have attracted a lot of publicity, and moreover, William Burns is a historical figure who certainly wasn't killed on the Osage reservation by Ernest or anyone else.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: In a unique twist, the usual epilogue detailing everyone's fates after the film's events is delivered as part of an in-universe true crime radio drama, right down to a small orchestra and some foley artists.
• Who's Your Daddy?: Anna was pregnant when she died, it turns out. Given her implied promiscuity, the father's left unknown (he may well have been involved with her murder).

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"Can you find the wolves in this picture?"

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