Killers of the Flower Moon is a serious film — a handsomely made film on an epic scale and certainly a somber and thoughtful film on a harrowing subject. This is a rare enough experience in American cinema to make it a must-see for anyone remotely interested in film. And for many who are calling it a certified Martin Scorsese masterpiece, it has a huge emotional impact.

And I wish I’d experienced it that way. Instead, I found it oddly subdued and constrained. Which perhaps it has to be, given the subject matter. Still, that makes it somewhat disappointing for me. After all, when I’m hearing about a Scorsese masterpiece, I’m expecting to stagger out of the theater feeling almost unstrung in the best possible way, because this is the filmmaker who brought us Goodfellas (1990), Raging Bull (1980), King of Comedy (1982), and Taxi Driver (1976), just to name my personal top four Scorsese achievements. His has a uniquely spectacular career spanning over half a century now.

Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, Scorsese’s adaptation shifts the focus away from investigator Tom White, the agent sent by young J. Edgar Hoover to inquire into the dozens of murders of oil-rich Osage Nation citizens in 1920s Oklahoma. Originally, Leonardo DiCaprio was set to star as White. But rightly perceiving that their initial approach to the script would play as an all-too-typical white-savior narrative, Scorsese and cowriter Eric Roth (Dune, The Insider, A Star Is Born) opted to shift the focus away from White (ultimately very well played here by Jesse Plemons), pushing his arrival in the Osage Nation to the last third of the three-and-a-half-hour film.