Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is directed by Martin McDonagh and it stars an impressive cast including Francis McDormand, Caleb Landry Jones, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage and Lucas Hedges. This movie shows how Mildred Hayes (McDormand) is dealing with the death of her teenage daughter and puts up these three billboards to get the police’s attention.

This film is basically the definition of harsh reality, it’s also brutally honest and it doesn’t hold back. You would expect a film like this to be serious and gloomy but this is a rare case of where there’s a perfect balance between dark humor and seriousness. I noticed that most people who saw this movie only mention Mildred (McDormand), Willoughby (Harrelson) and Dixon (Rockwell). While it’s understandable why they are the popular characters I found myself liking more the secondary characters particularly  Red played by Caleb Landry Jones and James played by Peter Dinklage. They go through a bit in this film and how they deal with it makes them such great characters.

The fictional town of Ebbing, Missouri is for the most part small-minded although most of the main characters are more open-minded than others. In terms of characters all of them are well written and by the end they are elevated into fleshed out characters with progress. This happens to all of them but the main character in a way. Mildred is back to square 1 in the end sort of, it’s confusing because of how they left it. Without giving too much away: Does she get closure and how does the ending turn out? The ending has such a major impact on the characters and cut the film halfway of the ” actual ending ”. The result of this is that the film is unfortunately incomplete, I’m not saying it needed a lot more but a few more minutes would’ve completed this story. This being said Mildred is still a great character played fantastically by McDormand  but we never see her evolve past the grieving, again is there closure?

SPOILER ALERT there is little to no closure I mean we don’t even know if she does get justice or if she kills that man or where her life went after that event I guess it’a left for the audience to decide.

One thing I noticed is that the marketing for this movie was in my opinion misleading they marketed it as more a comedy than a drama which it clearly is not. If you’re going to watch this movie get into the mindset that it’s a drama with a rather deep story with a bit of dark humor here and there. Overall this is still one of my favorite movies of 2017 and it’s definitely worth watching, it’s worth watching for the performances alone.

RATING: A-