Toronto festival audience prize for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri gives comedy a leg-up in Oscars race
Rage-fuelled comedy starring Frances McDormand as a frustrated mother who goads police to probe daughter’s murder properly, and Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage as her nemesis, voted best picture by film-goers
Martin McDonagh’s darkly hilarious drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri won the Toronto film festival’s audience prize for best picture on Sunday, giving it a leg up in the race for the Oscars.
The rage-fuelled film stars Frances McDormand as a frustrated and grieving mother, Mildred, who antagonises police (Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell) while trying to call attention to a lack of progress in the hunt for her daughter’s killer.
Months have passed without an arrest in the murder case, so she commissions three signs with controversial messages for police along a road leading into the fictional Missouri town.
But a backlash ensues. Mildred’s friends and the freckle-faced and cocky young agent (Caleb Landry Jones) who rents her the billboard space are targeted by the chief’s intellectually and emotionally stunted deputy, in violent reprisals that cost him his badge.
Australia’s Abbie Cornish and Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage also star in the film, which is McDonagh’s third after In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths.