The Sheep Detectives

The crime in question is the murder of their shepherd, the kindhearted George Hardy (Hugh Jackman), who names every ewe and ram, only raises them for their wool (he’s a vegetarian), and reads them mystery novels each night before bed. Once he’s retired for the evening, his flock — who, like all sheep, only communicate to their human counterparts with bleats — converse among themselves about the latest whodunnit. Wisest of all is Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who sees past the red herrings (“It was the maid!” one of her fellow sheep insists, even when the story doesn’t have one) to the heart of the crime.

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Suspects abound in the quaint (and fictional) village of Denbrook. There’s a rival shepherd (Tosin Cole), callous butcher (Conleth Hill), secretive innkeeper (Hong Chau), George’s just-arrived daughter (Molly Gordon), and the big-city lawyer (Emma Thompson) who informs them all that Geoge left behind $30 million. Denbrook’s sole police officer (Nicholas Braun) is on the case, unaware that he’s being aided at every turn by George’s faithful (and surprisingly adept) flock. Thanks to Lily’s insightful commentary throughout (“there’s always a will”), director Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives isn’t just a detective story but a deconstruction of the very form. Unlike most vaguely meta genre exercises, though, this one is more heartfelt than self-satisfied.

The sheep prove more memorable than the humans, however. George’s flock also includes a Boreray named Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart), a Danish Landrace who goes by Zora (Bella Ramsey), and twin Norfolk Horns who love to ram anything and everything named Reggie and Ronnie (Brett Goldstein). Just as all of them are committed to the cause of solving George’s murder — even if some are more confident in their sleuthing abilities than others — all of their interactions are infused with a naivete that’s never less than endearing.

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Some of them are also surprisingly heavy, touching on matters of life and death in a more overtly existential manner than most viewers will be expecting. George’s flock doesn’t know much of the outside world, but Lily, Zora, and all the rest of them do know how much he meant to them — and how much kinder he was than most people. A scene that finds them petrified to cross the road dividing their field from the town proper is amusing, but it’s also fraught with genuine worry for their wellbeing. The same and more can be said of a later sequence in which three of them descended upon by that rival shepherd’s guard dogs and one of them makes a brave, fateful decision; reader, it made me cry.

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The talking-animal canon isn’t exactly littered with classics, and yet it doesn’t feel like faint praise to say that The Sheep Detectives deserves pride of place among the likes of Babe and Milo and Otis as one of the genre’s best. (It’s also, if you’ll forgive the hot take, a significantly more engaging whodunnit than the newest Knives Out.) Based on Three Bags Full, a German novel by Leonie Swann first published in 2005, it manages to be a family-friendly, all-ages entertainment even as it touches on decidedly adult topics. One of them is how we treat outsiders, embodied here by two “winter lambs” who are ostracized by the otherwise kind flock, all of whom were born in spring: grizzled Sebastian (voiced by Bryan Cranston) and a yet-to-be-named lamb who doesn’t know why the other younglings won’t play with him.

Reader, it made me cry.

The ovine mythology doesn’t end there. Every sheep but one has the ability to forget bad memories on command, which is why they believe that their kind turn into clouds rather than die; only Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) is burdened with the true knowledge of mortality, something he’s witnessed more times than he can count. The screenplay is by Craig Mazin, who’s explored similarly thorny material as the creator/writer of Chernobyl and co-creator and -writer of The Last of Us. That may sound like an odd pairing with the director of two Despicable Me movies, but the result is a delightful mishmash of sensibilities so warm and fuzzy you might mistake it for your favorite wool sweater.

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What ultimately makes The Sheep Detectives so special is that it isn’t really about who murdered George. It’s about what his life meant — what any life means, really, even and especially those of small, gentle creatures whose inner worlds we tend not to consider. Why condescend to viewers when you can impart wisdom instead, after all? That might sound like a bit much for the kiddos for whom this endlessly sweet movie was ostensibly intended, but The Sheep Detectives trusts its audience, regardless of age, to make sense of the clues it leaves behind.