Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs has strong feelings about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
Killers of the Flower Moon — which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone — was released in United States theaters on October 20, 2023. On October 23, Jacobs, who plays Elora Danan Postoak on FX’s Reservation Dogs, shared a thread on Twitter where she called the movie “painful, grueling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic.”
Read Jacobs’ full thread below.
What did Devery Jacobs say about Killers of the Flower Moon?
“Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire,” Jacobs wrote. “Imagine the worst atrocities committed against [your] ancestors, then having to sit [through] a movie explicitly filled w/ them, w/ the only respite being 30min long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.
“It must be noted that Lily Gladstone is an absolute legend & carried Mollie w/ tremendous grace. All the incredible Indigenous actors were the only redeeming factors of this film. Give Lily her goddamn Oscar. But while all of the performances were strong, if you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.”
Jacobs continued to say she understands the graphic violence in the movie is meant to help audiences understand the atrocities that were committed against the Osage; however, she felt the deaths didn’t give the real-life victims “honor or dignity.” She added, “Contrarily, I believe that by showing more murdered Native women on screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people.”
She also wrote, “I can’t believe it needs to be said, but Indig ppl exist beyond our grief, trauma & atrocities. Our pride for being Native, our languages, cultures, joy & love are way more interesting & humanizing than showing the horrors white men inflicted on us. This is the issue when non-Native directors are given the liberty to tell our stories; they center the white perspective and focus on Native people’s pain.”
Jacobs concluded the thread by saying she’d rather see a $200 million movie made by an Osage filmmaker and called for better representation of Indigenous communities in film and media.
