The movie opens on low boil with Mildred behind the wheel of her station wagon near three derelict billboards. McDonagh doesn’t have much to say in that movie - it has a bunny, stolen dogs, guys with guns, good and bad jokes - but what little is said is said by very fine performers grooving on all his words and larky nonsense. He skated through his last movie, “Seven Psychopaths,” a barely there comedy that pivots on a creatively stalled screenwriter.
McDonagh is a pain artist whose tools include absurd violence, cruel laughs and sucker punches. A playwright (“ The Pillowman”) turned filmmaker (“ In Bruges”) who’s somewhat of a subgenre unto himself, Mr. The pain of others haunts “Three Billboards,” at least whenever the writer-director Martin McDonagh lets it. When she realizes how sick Willoughby is, she looks at him as if for the first time. She has rented three billboards attacking his failure to solve her daughter’s murder - one reads “Raped While Dying” - and has been so wrapped up in her hurt that she hasn’t seen anyone else’s. Until then, Mildred has seemed impervious to his pain. It happens during an uneasily intimate encounter between her character, a tough number named Mildred, and an ailing police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). At one point in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Frances McDormand tears the movie open, showing you what a broken heart looks like.