Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Director: Martin McDonagh
Plot:
After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby (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 is only exacerbated.
Trivia
- While traveling through the Southern United States in around 1998, Martin McDonagh came across a couple of accusatory billboards concerning the 1991 unsolved homicide of Kathy Page by her distraught father in Vidor, Texas. These particular billboards highlighted the incompetence of police work and deeply affected McDonagh so much that those images "stayed in my mind kept gnawing at me" This incident, combined with his desire to create strong female characters, inspired him to write the story for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. McDonagh discussed the creative process, saying that it took him about ten years to "[decide] that it was a mother who had taken these things out. It all became fiction based on a couple of actual billboards".
Male Deaths:
- Woody Harrelson (Chief Willoughby)
Female Deaths:
- Kathryn Newton (Angela Hayes)