Killers Of The Flower Moon Review: 9 Ups & 1 Down

6. It's Surprisingly Hilarious

Though the movie's marketing quite understandably painted it as a relatively serious and severe piece of work, one of the big surprises is that it's frequently genuinely hilarious.

Scorsese and Roth's script is filled with moments of unexpected levity, from an early scene where Burkhart and Hale discuss Burkhart's sexual proclivities to a bevy of darkly comedic sequences later on which rank among the most grimly funny in the filmmaker's entire ouevre.

Scorsese derives much humour from the shocking, brazen stupidity of the film's most opportunistic characters, and that he does this without undermining the movie's serious message about the atrocities committed against the Osage people is truly impressive.

And so, if you weren't sure about sitting through a dour 3.5-hour drama about terrible people doing very horrible things, know that there are least regular spicings of gallows humour to savour.