Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
2017 · Directed by Martin McDonagh
Original language: English
- crime
- drama
The story
After seven months have passed without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at Bill Willoughby, the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Jason Dixon, an immature mother's boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement is only exacerbated.
What it’s like
Muted autumn light over flat Missouri farmland, with the cold red and white of three roadside billboards cutting through an otherwise washed-out palette of brown fields, grey police cars and fluorescent-lit diners. Wide, still compositions let awkward silences and sudden outbursts sit in the frame, and the dialogue is sharp, profane and often darkly funny, though the mood curdles quickly into anger and grief. Its vibe is bleak, bitter and blackly comic, best suited to a cold night in or a stretch of time when you want a bruising, talky drama rather than comfort. Violence is abrupt and genuinely brutal: a few scenes of beatings and a shocking, sudden act of fire and injury, plus frequent racist and homophobic slurs, grief over a child's murder, and a cancer subplot. Pacing is loose and character-driven, following a grieving, unyielding mother and a set of flawed townspeople who are slowly exposed as more complicated than they first seem. It suits viewers who like morally messy, fiercely acted character studies with savage humour and no easy redemption.
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