--- title: Breaking Down the Ending of Killers of the Flower Moon description: The final minutes—including a Martin Scorsese cameo—usher us out of this movie in a way that helps us articulate our own feelings about it. canonical: https://time.com/6326449/killers-of-the-flower-moon-ending/ author: Stephanie Zacharek article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-10-20T20:02:23.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-19T07:27:44.132Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Ends Like No Other Movie og:description: The final minutes usher us out of this movie in a way that helps us articulate our own feelings about it. og:url: https://time.com/6326449/killers-of-the-flower-moon-ending/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt062c2e5f661c655b/698a4142096a947ac96ae364/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon_Photo_0101.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 6000 og:image:height: 3375 og:image:alt: Killers-of-the-Flower-Moon_Photo_0101 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Ends Like No Other Movie twitter:description: The final minutes usher us out of this movie in a way that helps us articulate our own feelings about it. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt062c2e5f661c655b/698a4142096a947ac96ae364/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon_Photo_0101.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Ending of _Killers of the Flower Moon_ Is Astonishing > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. ## Video: Martin Scorsese | Profiles in TIME 2023 [Watch (HLS stream): Martin Scorsese | Profiles in TIME 2023](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/3EuStm5E.m3u8) (10:04)  _Published 2023-10-12. The final minutes usher us out of this mournful, vital movie in a way that both underscores Scorsese’s deep connection with the material and helps us articulate our own feelings about it._  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Oct 20, 2023 8:02 PM UTC  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Oct 20, 2023 8:02 PM UTC **_Warning: This post contains spoilers for_** **Killers of the Flower Moon** **_._** In film criticism as it stands today, unless you’re writing for a specific, rarefied audience, discussing a film’s ending is verboten. Breathe just a hint of detail about a final scene, or even a closing shot, and the spoiler police will not be amused. But once in a while, a film ending is so potent, so powerful both on its own terms and as the culmination of all that has come before, that it demands consideration by itself. Martin Scorsese’s extraordinary film _Killers of the Flower Moon,_ adapted from [David Grann’s 2017 book](https://time.com/4737945/killers-flower-moon-david-grann-review/) about the systematic and [ghoulish murders of rich Osage landowners in 1920s Oklahoma](https://time.com/6325555/killers-of-the-flower-moon-osage-legacy-essay/), is one of those pictures. The final minutes usher us out of this mournful, vital movie in a way that both underscores Scorsese’s deep connection with the material and helps us articulate our own feelings about it. Maybe it’s even less of an ending than a beginning, a portal into the movie’s afterlife—in my case, the movie stuck with me for days, weeks, memories of it reappearing unbidden like a message written in smoke. If you haven’t yet seen _Killers of the Flower Moon,_ consider yourself warned to stop reading here. If you’ve seen it, and it’s haunting you, this is a chance for us to be haunted together. The setting is Osage territory in early 1920s Oklahoma. Lily Gladstone gives a numinous performance as Mollie Burkhart, an Osage Indian whose oil-rich land—land to which the U.S. government had, decades earlier, pressured her people to relocate—has made her a very wealthy woman. An ambitious but not-very-bright World War I veteran, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), woos and marries her, largely at the suggestion of his uncle, crooked cattleman William Hale (Robert De Niro), though Ernest does seem to genuinely love Mollie. Even so, he willingly becomes part of Hale’s devious plot to kill off rich Osage in order to acquire their oil rights. **Read More:** [_How_ Killers of the Flower Moon _Compares to the Best-Selling Book It Adapts_](https://time.com/6324453/killers-of-the-flower-moon-movie-book-changes/) One by one, members of Mollie’s family are murdered, their deaths framed as accident or coincidence; Ernest is aware of, or directly involved in, at least two of those murders, and he actively participates in the planned murder of his own wife. (In real life, these atrocities were part of a series of crimes, many unsolved, that may have claimed the lives of some 100 members of the Osage nation, and possibly many more.) An upstanding Bureau of Investigation agent named Tom White (Jesse Plemons) shows up to investigate murders in the community, and eventually cracks the case. But Scorsese has framed the story so that the emphasis is on Mollie and her family, and on Ernest’s heinous betrayal of a woman he truly loved. The main story ends with Mollie’s reluctant, painful acknowledgement of her husband's role in the murders. But it’s followed by a coda in which Scorsese himself appears, a kind of breaking of the fourth wall in which the teller of this tale reaffirms Mollie as the true heart of this saga, and reminds us that while life is evanescent, history is forever.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon Apple TV+ This coda takes its cues from radio serials of the 1930s and 1940s, when home entertainment meant gathering around a device that stoked the imagination with the use of sound, not images—for the latter, you went to the movies. In real life, the story of the Osage murders was dramatized in an episode of _The Lucky Strike Hour_ in 1933; Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover gave his blessing to the broadcast, fully aware of its potential PR value. _Killers of the Flower Moon_ ends with an imagined re-creation of the recording of this broadcast, featuring a cast of mostly male voice actors (they include Larry Fessenden and musician Jack White) detailing the aftermath of the case. We learn that Hale and Burkhart were convicted but also eventually pardoned; the Osage point of view is represented by a voice actor speaking in cartoonish pidgin English. **Read More:** [_Martin Scorsese Still Has Stories to Tell_](https://time.com/collection/time100-leadership-series/6311403/martin-scorsese-killers-of-the-flower-moon-interview/) This, Scorsese is telling us, is how events are remembered and retold and turned into what we know as history, usually by people who didn’t experience it directly. Storytelling does, at least, keep these stories alive. But in most cases, and certainly in the case of the Osage murders, the people who have suffered the most aren’t the ones with the means to bring their stories to the wider world. In the early 1930s, roughly 10 years after the real-life events took place, the story of the Osage murders is left to a group of white voice actors dressed in natty suits, with a range of Foley effects at their disposal. Some 95 years later, that story will be told again, in carefully researched form, by a white journalist. And about 100 years later, it will become a movie, made by a white man who’s also quite possibly the world’s greatest living director. Scorsese has often appeared, uncredited, in his films. We either hear his voice (as, say, a dispatcher in _Bringing Out the Dead_) or get Hitchcock-like glimpses of him (as in _Taxi Driver_ or [_Raging Bull_](https://time.com/3801604/magnificent-obsession-robert-de-niro-on-the-set-of-raging-bull/)). It’s as if he has waded so deeply into the telling of these stories that he can’t help inserting himself in the picture, in even just a small way—he’s the painter who can’t resist dabbing his own image semi-secretly onto the canvas, like Jan van Eyck reflected in a convex mirror as he bears witness to a sumptuous wedding. Read More: [_The Power of Osage Storytelling_](https://time.com/6325824/osage-stories-geoffrey-standing-bear-essay/) But Scorsese’s appearance in _Killers of the Flower Moon,_ as a radio producer who steps to the mic for the last word of this reimagined Lucky Strike Radio Hour broadcast, is different. He gives us, with thumbnail brevity, the essence of Mollie Burkhart’s obituary. She died in 1937\. She was a full-blood Osage. She was buried next to the members of her family who had predeceased her. Then he adds the telling detail, and though his voice is measured, you wonder if his heart isn’t cracking as he reads it: “There was no mention of the murders.” This, Scorsese appears to be saying, is how Mollie Burkhart’s life was measured and summed up at the time of her death. In his book, Grann had fleshed out more of her story. And Scorsese, in his restructuring of the material, has tried to restore her dignity even further—though he seems to know that the idea of “restoring dignity” is paternalistic by itself. A person’s—a woman’s—dignity is hers alone; does she really need another human, a man, to spruce it up and hand it back to her? With just one sentence, Scorsese, a man addicted to telling stories, inherently acknowledges the bitter fallacy of that idea. Directors are generally confident people, sometimes to the point of hubris. But Scorsese’s final words in _Killers of the Flower Moon_ are an act of humility, offered by a filmmaker who knows he’s rounding the bend toward the final years of his career. The movie’s closing image is an Osage celebration, a circle of dancers rendered as a kaleidoscopic whirl. Mollie’s spirit, her history, is alive in them. But Scorsese, the outsider, wants to honor her too. He has done his best to bring her to life for us, through Gladstone's performance, in a movie so vivid and sympathetic that it leaves a burning after-image. This is the best offering he can make to Mollie Burkhart. And still, he knows it’s not enough. ## Transcript I guess they're two trains running in a way the story that you want to tell them how you want to tell it. Sometimes my father would say, we talked about a film and then with his brother is here and they can't know, they can't show that. I can't do that. What can we tell the stories in it supposed to tell? I was really attracted to kill us the flower Moon initially by the combination of the words, flower Moon and Killers impression I got from the juxtaposition of those words, I was drawn to the story in the landscape but primarily the story because of the nature of the scam. I was interested in that manipulation of the people, particularly the intimacy of ordinarily villains, hate their victims, Etc. They love them but they killed them. And that's interesting that also reflects who we are as a western culture itself, European culture, what are the values that we brought to this new land and the story seems to hit right at the heart of that money flows freely here. Now I do love that money sir. I try to make a list over the years of films that I I personally feel with my favorites. That means then you find out that the favorite has different levels as opposed to go and best list, you know. Broke all the rules. And when they say, you can't many different levels to the film, as far as I know, the guys did Braveheart, studied it. I know we studied a lot different from Alexander, nevsky film, The thing about it is the sense of paranoia, the low ceilings, claustrophobia the location of the year. Do people get shows up in the apartment was also in the crowd King beater? And of course, the scene with the painter, with the slacks up, in the Garret with the children's eyes looking through as they raised the pipe. That's the trial. Got the idea, you know, there are things like that. When you talk about feelings and influence their memories staying in your head, Question. I'm partial to Kubrick's 2001 released several times and it's a Transcendent film. There's no doubt about that. About the picture was the under plain. What are you talkin about? Bishop thermostat 1968. I think it was just the focus is you and apparently the critics didn't even go for that. If you seen 2001 somebody time, watch Barry, Lyndon Elegance, the framing. And as easy as out for me detail, it becomes an eighteenth-century painting. What do you do more interesting to me is the GHIN, the Rhythm and pasting of the 18th century, Sumptuous Lush, gorgeous. And halting a classic have an estimable value. Committee was very important to me because I saw on television with my grandparents and I realize making the same language that my grandparents feet, which I don't really understand something. And the suffering that was shown was being shown on screen was very real and look like to be any of us not interested in watching the war Trilogy wrestling. I would suggest the beauty and joy of watching Steve bright, a little flowers of Saint Francis. Sweet. Funny disturbing in a good way because Francis as if he's capable of capable of it. Grandma's deliver. The first Technicolor film shot in India to another culture, painting on the ground. And it's a moving picture. I just live with that one. Get soup. If you're interested in classic japanese Cinema, and Japanese culture of certain. This is the most poetic Do you want something from Japan? Just take a look at high and low wide screen black and white characters. As you're watching the picture and not bright screen black and white with the drug addict. This sort of thing. You really feel you're going into a kind of a Bosch painting in a way. Is the red shoes, pal, pressburger films, and of course, Visconti film The Leopard. Which is a great favorite of mine and look at it classical images in. It actually, is to me now where my grandmother was born when they get out of the coach and a couple of dust the sense of time, passing like in Barry, Lyndon whole lives by cultures, in this case, class class has to leave for another class to become them. She says, everything has to change in order to remain the same. Polish film by andrzej wajda called ashes and diamonds. There's this wonderful actor, tobolski who wears a special sunglasses because he plays the character in the Warsaw Ghetto is so long that you can't stand the light and he's a warrior fighter. At the end of the war in the last 24 hours, really. He is caught in this web But ultimately undoes him. But at the same time for the first time in his life, he meets this young woman and has one of the most powerful endings visual surprises, just the way. Billy is no more. And you're not going to get out of it, but at the same time, they don't realize there's a life out there but they aren't meant to live it. 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