Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Release date: 2017-12-01
Country: UK|USA
Language: English
Director: Martin McDonagh
Production Co: Blueprint Pictures, Film 4, Fox Searchlight Pictures
Genre: Drama, Crime
Rating: 8.2/10
Length: 1h 55min

Storyline

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI is a darkly comic drama from Academy Award nominee Martin McDonagh (In Bruges). After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes (Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby (Academy Award nominee Woody Harrelson), the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Dixon (Academy Award winner Sam Rockwell), an immature mother's boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement is only exacerbated.

Plot Keywords

black comedy, police brutality, billboard, small town, thrown through a window, ambiguous ending, racist cop, death of daughter, molotov cocktail, loss of daughter, suicide by gunshot, fire, violence, anger, suicide note, reference to oscar wilde, cancer patient, loss of job, advertising agency, single mother

Short Review

Perhaps it takes an outsider like McDonagh to get it right, but by picture's end, a few wrenches of plot unite the deplorable with Mildred and lend him a contrived sympathy.