Directed by Martin McDonagh. Reviewed by Paul Sorrell

The film opens with an event that might have been pulled from today’s headlines. In a small town in rural America, a girl has been raped and murdered, and her vengeful mother, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), is out to find the killer. Frustrated by the apparent inactivity of the local police department, Mildred pastes up posters on three billboards outside the town, naming Chief of Police Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson).

Keeping the other cops in line like the head of an unruly family, Willoughby is a respected figure in town. When he dies under tragic circumstances, things begin to turn nasty for Mildred, but she refuses to back down.

Before he died, Willoughby had written letters to his family, to Mildred and also to Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a vicious redneck cop who boasts of “torturing people of colour” and who has recently been sacked from the force for throwing the local signage contractor (and owner of the billboards in question) out of his office window.

Dixon is one of a procession of grotesques that populate the movie including a sadistic dentist, a slow-witted priest and a genial dwarf. The film constantly teeters on a knife-edge between tragedy and comedy, skin-crawling horror and sly humour, occasionally lurching to one extreme or the other and making us either uncomfortable or incredulous. “Black comedy” is probably the closest we can come to putting a name on it.

The surreal action is reinforced by the props: as in the comics that Dixon spends much of his time reading, space is compressed so that the police station is conveniently sited directly opposite the signage company offices where much of the drama unfolds. And the scene where Mildred calmly tosses Molotov cocktails into the police HQ is like something out of a graphic novel.

Yet, as in McDonagh’s In Bruges, this bizarre mix of slapstick humour and pure nastiness is leavened by a moral consciousness. If Three Billboards shows us evidence of the corrosive power of anger, hatred, guilt, violence and revenge, it also suggests, ever so tentatively, what redemption might look like. After reading Chief Willoughby’s posthumous letter suggesting that he search for the hero inside the repugnant exterior, Dixon begins to reform himself and teams up with Mildred, as the unlikely pair embark on a quest to find themselves rather than destroy others.

Although I am still struggling to understand and appreciate this film, while watching it I was enthralled, appalled and amused by turns, but never bored. Perhaps that’s the point. See it and make up your own mind.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 224, March 2018: 29.