Martin Scorsese has been one of the greatest American filmmakers for so long that it's become easy to take him for granted. Conversations about his films become conversations around his films. Will a general audience like it? Does it have a place in the movie theaters alongside "more popular" genres? Have his runtimes ballooned past the audience's patience? It's easier to ask these questions—so dependent on the current state of market-driven cinema—than it is to wonder what it will look like when Scorsese passes. What it will feel like when a new Scorsese movie on the horizon isn't a given, when American cinema loses one of its most creatively-driven and generous ambassadors. And if the discourse surrounding his movies isn't discussing this forthcoming end of an era, Scorsese himself sure is with his newest work.

Killers of the Flower Moon feels like a culmination of Scorsese's decades of creative work. At times, it's playful and funny, at other times, it's deeply heartbreaking and even outright frightening, with some of the most quietly horrific moments in his career since Shutter Island. In interviews before the film's release, the director namechecked Ari Aster's films Hereditary and Midsommar, along with John Ford’sThe Searchers, as inspirations for the film's sickening moments and dread-inducing pacing. Like with Paimon's cult in Hereditary, there's very little doubt that there's a great evil enacting a plan that cannot be stopped. If the audience can see the evil more clearly than some of the characters, it's only because acknowledging it would be enough to drive anyone insane.

Scorsese dipping into the horror genre with nods to a contemporary director is as surprising as it is fitting. Even at 80 years old, the director refuses to calcify creatively, incorporating new techniques and contemporary twists in his newest film. Yes, of course there's a Robbie Robertson needle drop and a quietly stylish rising pan over a carefully choreographed crowd shot in a pristine period piece setting. But there's also drone shots that break the 20th century immersion to remind the viewer that these crimes are recent, that these sins are not so far removed from our own time. There's a stunning scene in which a group of white business people compel a character to do evil, deep shadows and pale faces staring at the camera in a shot that wouldn't be out of place in a (good) A24 horror movie. A pessimist might read these moments as Scorsese bowing to popular convention, but it feels more like a celebration of filmmaking and an acknowledgement that the medium will survive even as its arguably greatest champion won't. Killers is, like other late-era Scorsese films Silence and The Irishman, an unflinching look at faith, regret, and what leaving a legacy means. But Killers pushes things further, expanding these themes to encompass America itself—what America is as a country and as a people will leave behind as an enduring legacy.

As Americans, we're used to holding paradoxes in our heads. "The Greatest Country on Earth" (that was built on the backs of slaves on land stolen from its native people). A justice system that treats the rich and the poor alike—as long as the guardians of that system actually abide by their own rules. The land of opportunity where anyone can strike it rich—as long as you've got the political capital to hold onto those gains when someone else wants what you have. These are lies more apparent to some communities, and Native Americans arguably have more experience with them than anyone else in America. The history of atrocities committed against Native Americans is horrific to comprehend and overwhelming in its centuries-long totality. But as important as it is to acknowledge that history, Native Americans do not exist in perpetual agony, and to imagine such is to reduce them to bit characters in a larger story. They loved and lived their own lives, effected and hindered by years of government policy and systemic and personal racism, but their lives were, and continue to be, more than what was inflicted upon them in this moment of history.

The opening of Killers beautifully illustrates the careful nuanced balance that Scorsese treads in adapting this story. A tribal council mourns as they acknowledge that their ways are dying out and that their children will be raised in the white man's way. A burial for a ceremonial pipe leads to oil bursting from the ground as Osage men dance in the stream. The music kicks in, and we see recreations of early cinematic depictions of the Osage people as they use their newfound oil-wealth to build their community into, as the film says, "the wealthiest per capita area in the world." It's a deliberate pushback of the average audience member's conception of Native people—here we see the Osage wearing the newest Western fashions, driving cars, looking as cosmopolitan as our idea of New Yorkers from the time. It's not necessarily an optimistic vision, either—there are flashes of traditional fashions and activities, but we're seeing the assimilation of a people at the same time. The oil brings wealth and that prosperity is signified by an embrace of what white America wants that to look like. It's a lucky gift after centuries of mistreatment but it's a curse, too.

After the opening, we meet Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman living with diabetes and the de facto matriarch of her large family after her mother's unspecified illness leaves her unable to collect the headrights (profits from the oil sale) of her family. The Osage people are wealthy, but their money is not entirely theirs—they still have to go into town and justify their expenses semi-weekly. Into the mix comes Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), a returning war vet eager to make as much money as he can while working as little as he can. Ernest's uncle is William Hale (Robert DeNiro), the self-proclaimed King of the Osage whose careful embrace of the Osage language and their teachings has made him perfectly situated to work as the go-between for the Osage and the white residents of the town. Hale has a plan to wrest control of the oil rights from the Osage by marrying white settlers to eligible Osage men and women before murdering them or letting sickness claim their lives. With no other descendents, the headrights, and the money associated, would go to their surviving spouse and any mixed-race children they have.

It's a disgusting plan made worse by how seemingly sincere DeNiro plays the character in so many moments, speaking the Osage language and comforting grieving family members with one hand as he robs them with the other. When he calls the suicidal Henry Roan (William Belleau) his best friend, he sounds like he means it, even though the prior scene shows him taking out an insurance policy on Henry for when the expected death by suicide eventually happens.

The characters' perceptions of the world and themselves is a theme that runs heavy through the movie. Mollie spends the first half of the film carefully observing the situation, her status as seemingly the only mature adult in the family clearly instilling a sometimes-painful amount of responsibility in her. Gladstone's performance in the film is incredible, dominating each scene she's in with a quiet charisma that can't be ignored. You watch her as she watches everyone else and even the audience can only get a glimpse of her inner thoughts. But even the most perceptive character in the film can't really see the depths of evil emerging from her own family like so much oil from the ground.

America is built on evil acts, a truth hard to stomach for white citizens. For Ernest, the perpetuation of evil is justified by fear, by the lie that it's for his family, by his own greed. He's still a good person because he believes that to be true, and fully confronting his own actions is too much to bear. We all make moral compromises to live another day and to believe that our own legacy can exist untainted and admired. With his latest (and hopefully not last) film, Scorsese looks to his own legacy and America's legacy and finds what truth and justice he can. The film focuses on the Osage living just as much as it does on the famous murders, and if there is a sense of a better path going forward, it's in celebrating their lives and their culture still ongoing. It's through the collaboration, love, and respect for the Osage that Scorsese is able to, even this late in his creative life, evolve and grow as an artist. That, too, can be a legacy left, and if Killers of the Flower Moon is not the best film of Scorsese's career, it's only because he's made the best film of his career so many times before.

A Legacy to Behold in Killers of the Flower Moon