It has several moments when you find yourself feeling guilty about laughing at the expense of the characters’ misfortunes, as when a man gets blown away by a Molotov bomb (“you’ve had a run of bad luck but things are going to change, I can feel it”) or when a dentist's thumb is perforated with his own drill. “Three Billboards” is tragic but it is also a very funny film. Mildred herself is verbally and physically abusive towards good and bad alike, and, in a flashback scene, we come to learn that her much idealized daughter Angela ( Kathryn Newton), the victim of the crime, was hardly an angel herself.
Among them are the seemingly incompetent Sheriff Willoughby ( Woody Harrelson) the violent, momma’s boy, deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell) the not-too-bright, advertising company employee in charge of leasing Mildred the signs ( Caleb Landry Jones) Mildred’s suffering son Robbie ( Lucas Hedges) and her abusive ex-husband Charlie ( John Hawkes). Most of the characters affected by their presence are clearly racist to one degree or the other, and that is far from their only fault.
“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” deals with the wild chain of events that follow store clerk Mildred Hayes’ ( Frances McDormand) decision to use three abandoned signs on a seldom traveled road to express her outrage over law enforcement's inability to make any arrests on her daughter’s rape and murder case.