Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (Dir. Martin McDonagh, 1 h 55m)

 At the centre of Martin McDonagh's savagely funny, viscerally violent, and surprisingly poignant Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are, on black and red, in truly huge letters, the following question across the film's titular billboards:

RAPED WHILE DYING""AND STILL NO ARRESTS?""HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?"

Three Billboards not only concerns itself with the subject matter of the billboards-the rape and murder of a teenage girl, and her mother, Mildred Hayes (a searingly funny yet emotionally weighed performance by Frances McDormand)'s quest for justice, against a police department headed by a sympathetic but ultimately powerless chief (Woody Harrelsson), but in the reactions across the community, and the eventual fate of Mildred's quest for closure, and the billboards' fate.


 Three Billboards, for much of its run time, is, without a doubt, a critique of the American Police, both in terms of their ineptitude-it's indicated early on that the case around the death of Mildred's daughter has essentially been allowed to go cold, and the police officers range from casually racist to lazy-and in their brutality. From Three Billboards, opening scenes, McDonagh depicts a bickering, foul mouthed. and moreover, brutal, and corrupt police force, having to rephrase their torture of a black suspect as "people of colour torturing business", arresting Mildred's coworker to put pressure on her, slowly but surely turning the screws on her, and, in one of the film's most shocking (yet surprisingly verite-style) scenes, beating up and then throwing the head of the company who hires the billboards out of the window of his office.

Harrelsson's Chief Willoughby is, in comparison, a surprisingly empathetic figure, sympathising with Mildred, even as her quest for a form of revenge takes a decidedly questionable turn, with her reasoning in the face of her daughter's killer being untraceable eventually suggesting that the entire world's male population should have their DNA taken at birth under suspicion of guilt.Willoughby is further humanised, as he works to try and placate Mildred and the rest of the town, as well as deal with the case, by his other battle with time, and his death from cancer. Unlike the other men on his force, there is a sense that Willoughby is simply a man trying to do his best for the community around him, and even in the scenes after his death, his empathy, and dark sense of humour radiate through the rest of the film.

Throughout the film, there is also a sense of the community turning on Mildred, in defence of the police department-McDonagh shows his usual panache of mixing bloody violence and comedy of the darkest hue in one scene, with Mildred drilling a hole in the dentist's hand after he attempts to attack her, to which Harrelson drolly replies "No-one likes dentists". Throughout the film, however, the volume and intensity of the antagonism between Mildred and the town intensifies, culminating in a firebombing scene both brutally satisfying and bleakly comic. Certainly, there is a sense throughout the film of a small-town, close-knit community that Mildred is disrupting-the foulmouthed putdown of the local priest who confides to her that her actions risk alienating her from the community indicates a certain uncomfortableness with this questioning of authority, and in the police being brought to task.

Three Billboards, however, is, at heart, a film about closure, and justice, and the three focal characters' journeys through these are very different, and shot through with both a great deal of humour and pathos. Mildred, for all her foul mouthed bravado, all her violence and threats, and her cold, callow persona, is a grieving mother, who sees the billboards as some way to keep her daughter's death in the public-a public that has moved on-'s eye, and pressure on the police department, who in her view simply have not done enough and instead expend energy on brutality. It is in the film's quiet moments, between the violence and the comedy, that the emptiness of Mildred's life becomes apparent, bent on closure that seems impossible for her, with a violent ex-husband who both blames her for her daughter's death and belittles her.

Sam Rockwell's officer Dixon, meanwhile, is a man who seems to represent everything that Mildred despises about the police-a violent, heavy drinking, racist, and lazy man whose violence towards the billboard company head eventually sees him fired. Yet, it is his small redemption, through Harrelson's letter, and his attempts to solve the case, and thus bring closure to both his department and Mildred, that brings the duo together-for all Dixon's faults, he is a police officer, and particularly under the tutelage of Willoughby, seeks to solve the crime, and prove himself. Whilst this may dilute McDonagh's message of the police being corrupt or lazy, it adds a further nuance to the film-that no-one, from the firebombing Mildred to the racist Dixon, is truly innocent, but also that no-one is incapable of closure and justice, although McDonagh allows one final twist of the knife late in the film, leaving us with closure, but not quite what either character expected.

Three Billboards is, in short, is a film that, in darkly funny strokes, explores the very nature of small town America, and the mentality that accompanies it, of the American justice system and the police, of justice and closure. It is a film that never quite answers the three-billboard question that Mildred poses, to Chief Willoughby but comes up with an answer that, at least partly, leaves her, and the audience satisfied. Much like McDonagh's In Bruges, Three Billboards is an instant classic.

Rating: Must See