Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) on Netflix
Seven months after her daughter's rape and murder, Mildred Hayes rents three billboards naming Chief Bill Willoughby. The town is upset, and officer Jason Dixon threatens Red Welby.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb8.1/10616,192 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Ebbing, Missouri, Mildred Hayes still awaits an arrest seven months after her daughter Angela was raped and murdered. She rents three billboards along Drinkwater Road that ask why the case is unsolved and name Chief Bill Willoughby, whose pancreatic cancer is an open secret in town. The signs anger residents, and Willoughby visits Mildred to ask her to remove them, but she refuses. Officer Jason Dixon, who is known for harassing African-American citizens, tries to intimidate Red Welby, the man who rented Mildred the billboards. Mildred's son Robbie is upset by the attention, and Mildred goes on live television to defend her decision.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Martin McDonagh got the idea while traveling through the Southern United States around 1998, when he saw billboards accusing Steve Page of murdering his wife Kathy Page in Vidor, Texas; they had actually been put up by James Fulton, whose daughter Kathy Page was assaulted and killed in 1991.
- Mildred and Dixon were written with Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell in mind; McDormand felt she was too old for the part and suggested Mildred be Angela's grandmother instead, but her husband Joel Coen persuaded her to take it.
- At the 71st British Academy Film Awards the film won five awards, including both Best Film and Outstanding British Film, a double that only it and The King's Speech had achieved since the Outstanding British Film category was reintroduced in 1992.
- Signs inspired by the film's three billboards have been used in protests by groups around the world, and both Martin McDonagh and Frances McDormand welcomed the fact that activists adopted them.
- In February 2018 the advocacy group Justice4Grenfell hired three vans with electronic screens and drove them around London carrying messages in the film's billboard style: "71 Dead", "And Still No Arrests?", "How Come?".
- The billboards were built by Allison Outdoor Advertising of Sylva and placed in a pasture near Black Mountain, North Carolina; locals found them upsetting so they were covered when not filming, and David Penix of Arden later bought the wood for a roof in Tennessee.
