Rough Justice RAGE AND REDEMPTION IN THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

Around twenty years ago, screenwriter and filmmaker Martin McDonagh was travelling through the southern states of America on a bus when a series of billboards caught his eye. ‘It was this raging, painful message, calling out the cops about a crime,’ he recounts.¹ These billboards would later become the catalyst for McDonagh’s third feature film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).² He has described his reasoning in an interview with British television channel Film4:

I kind of wondered who would’ve put something like that up […] My last two films [… were] pretty much male-dominated movies, so I wanted to do something that was kind of the opposite of that, to a degree – to have a very strong female lead – and once I got the idea that the person who put those billboards up was a mother and a very determined, strong and unusual one, everything kind of started to fall into place.³

The mother is Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), who lives in the fictional country town of Ebbing, Missouri. Seven months before the film’s opening scenes, her daughter, Angela (Kathryn Newton), was raped and murdered. The local police, headed by Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), have yet to find the killer. Grieving and frustrated, Mildred pays an advertising agency to put up three disused billboards alongside a road outside town with the slogans ‘RAPED WHILE DYING’, ‘STILL NO ARRESTS?’ and ‘HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?’ in bold black letters against bright-red backgrounds.

Her action incites