Three Billboards is about Mildred Hayes, an aging woman who wants retribution for her daughter’s rape and murder that happened seven months ago. She puts up three billboards on a road into town that demand justice from the well-liked chief of police, Willoughby. These billboards cause enormous controversy from the people in town and put her friends and family at risk from well-meaning neighbors.

The one thing about this movie that you cannot get around is that the characters are mean, racist people who live in a struggling town. The corruption of this town is first seen with Officer Dixon, a man who has allegations of torture against him. Mildred Hayes, the protagonist of the story, is willing to do whatever it takes in order to see justice served for the harm caused to her daughter. The last influential character in this movie is Chief Willoughby, who is accused of ignoring Angela Hayes’s case.

Dixon starts out as possibly the worst person you would never hope to meet, but by the end, you see him actually trying to improve himself. He runs an ironic character arc in his role as a police officer the moment he gets his badge taken away, he really begins to help the town and become motivated to help find Angela’s killer. Although Mildred’s character didn’t undergo a drastic change throughout the movie, her character remained as strong as the billboards she put up and forced other characters to change to her, not vice versa.

Willoughby almost didn’t live up to what I believed he would be, based on the trailer. When he killed himself one-third of the way through, I was shocked. He was the subject of the last billboard, and I wondered why his place in the story had ended so abruptly. But his suicide quickly allowed for more growth elsewhere in the story.

Fire held great symbolism and meaning within Three Billboards. It reoccurred so many times, it couldn’t have been accidental. Fire seems to symbolize being erased or dying. The only way Angela is known to die is by burning to death, one of the most horrifying ways to die. I thought the scene where the billboards burn was really interesting, because it seemed to hold parallels to events that weren’t shown on screen. Mildred is almost in hysterics trying to keep the billboards from burning, putting herself in danger to put them out, even against the will of her remaining son. I believe that in that scene Mildred saw the billboards as her daughter that she was unable to save, and if she could prevent them from burning she could forgive herself a little for Angela’s murder. Later, Mildred uses fire against the police department and attempts to destroy it. She is horrified when she learns that Dixon is still in the building and that she almost killed someone in the same way that someone killed her daughter.

Overall, I think that this was a movie that was well-deserving of its awards and nominations. Its commentary on human behavior and who we are was almost difficult to watch at times, but it was so well executed I couldn’t turn away.