SNAPSHOT
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a darkly comic drama from Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh. 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 (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. (official synopsis via Coming Soon)
Grief is an awful limbo world in which to exist.
Your life as you knew it is gone, and even if it largely continues on it as it was, in form at least, there’s an aching sense of immobilising loss that hangs over everything.
This grinding sense of powerlessness and inertia is compounded even more, I would suspect (thankfully it’s nothing like my experience) if your lost loved one was murdered and the police are yet to find the killer.
You can well understand how desperately exhausting that must be and why Mildred Hayes, played by the incomparable Frances McDormand, decides to take matters into her own hands.
In just one short trailer, we see what a powerhouse of a person she is and the lengths she will go to, devil and social properiety be damned, to find the answers she craves.
This looks like it will be an immensely powerful film with some added-in quirk and humour to leaven out the intensity, with a thoughtful, insightful eye on the way grief profoundly, and irretrievably, changes everything.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri opens 10 November USA and 1 January 2018 Australia.