Killers Of The Flower Moon's first official trailer is a twisted love story

Cinephiles have been waiting for a real taste of Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated drama, Killers Of The Flower Moon. Following a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie is set to make its theatrical debut on October 20 before streaming on Apple TV+. The first official trailer for the film, released on Wednesday, is a proportionally tiny bite of the three-hour feature, but it’s sure to whet fans’ appetite for the full thing.

The film centers on the “improbable romance” of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a white man and a member of the oil-rich Osage Nation, respectively. The trailer shows Ernest caught between two worlds, torn between the alluring greed of his fellow white settlers (represented by the silver-tongued Robert De Niro) and his wife’s grief over her family’s tragedy.

DiCaprio and Gladstone steal the show in the trailer (and Gladstone, in particular, received rave reviews out of Cannes), but the footage also offers a glimpse of recent Oscar winner Brendan Fraser as well as Jesse Plemons, whose character was sent from DC to investigate murders of members of the Osage Nation, much to Ernest’s chagrin.

Killers Of The Flower Moon was adapted for the screen by Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth based on the nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann. “My great interest was how some of these guys could have done what they did,” the filmmaker said earlier this year at CinemaCon, attended by The A.V. Club. He described the story as “a natural tragedy,” citing the love story as “the heart of the picture.” He wanted to explore how a betrayal could occur between two people who were “really in love with each other.” DiCaprio’s character developed “line by line, scene by scene,” Scorsese said. “We kept working on that script until the last day of shooting.”