Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from World War I and comes into the employ of his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a wealthy cattle farmer and respected man about town. Almost immediately, Hale begins manipulating his willing but slow-witted nephew into his plans. What if, he suggests, you were to fall in love with an Osage woman? Well, you’d have a finger in the oil, wouldn't you? And what if, he expands, something should happen to her? Well, if all the loose ends had been properly tied, the headrights would transfer to you, wouldn’t they?
What follows is a slow-burning, frequently bloody and often cruel long-game heist. Ernest courts a well-heeled Osage townswoman, Mollie Burkhart (an incredibly versatile and deep performance from Lily Gladstone), eventually marrying her. At the same time, his uncle is whispering in his ear about how to reduce competition on what could be his claim, pulling in others to commit murder for him, or make certain things in their way disappear.
That it clocks in at just under three-and-a-half hours without losing a bit of its increasing pressure and tension is testament to Scorsese’s power. The moments of vast, deafening silence as Mollie and Ernest’s marriage begins to hit the rocks (if you liked DiCaprio’s ‘deep-in-thought-but-still-confused’ face from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, you’ve lucked out) are just as dramatic and vital as the heart-racing scenes of explosion and death. The bits that can make you laugh, meanwhile, come from being able to capture the natural and every day as well as it does the important and intense.
When it comes to the latter, it’s often carried out in classic Scorsese manner – casually walking up and putting a pistol to someone’s head without ceremony; an uncomfortably normal-paced stabbing down an alley in the middle of the day; people found in cars abandoned miles from home with no witnesses. What they do to Mollie is truly awful in its drawn-out suffering.