‘The Sheep Detectives’ Review

A charming throwback that straddles the line between kids’ movie and adult fable.

Baaa. (Courtesy Amazon MGM Studios)

AN ODD THING HAS HAPPENED every time I’ve been in a theater where the trailer for The Sheep Detectives has played.

At first, there is a confused tittering, an almost palpable wave of disbelief that this ridiculous thing has the temerity to exist. The murmurs percolate and then boil over: “Hugh Jackman’s reading detective stories to a flock of sheep? And they talk? And they solve his murder? Wolverine’s murder? What the hell is this?” But as the trailer continues the murmuring slows and people start paying attention and they realize that, whatever this thing is, it’s . . . amusing. The murmurs turn to chuckles, some self-consciously stifled. More often than not, the audience is at least open to the possibility that this thing is not ridiculous and might, in fact, be worth their time.

And, indeed, it is: The Sheep Detective is a high-grade all-ages entertainment, a throwback kids’ movie that nudges up to that line of darkness that ran through so much of our 1980s cinematic entertainments without quite crossing over. Occasionally a bit arch and a little heavy-handed in its messaging, the jokes land and the mystery will keep audiences guessing up until the final moments.

That mystery involves the murder of George Hardy (Jackman), a shepherd who lives outside a small British village with his flock of rams and ewes. He has named all the members of ragtag ovine crew—there’s the clever Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the distinguished Sir Ritchfield (Patrick Stewart), the loner Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), and the pretty Cloud (Regina Hall), among a dozen or so others—and each night before bedtime he reads to them from his collection of murder mysteries. Lily always comes up with the right answers, which makes her the perfect ewe to solve George’s murder by poisoning.

Lord knows the bumbling Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) won’t be of much help: He’s got no experience in this kind of case. But someone will have to figure out if the killer is the competing farmer Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole), coldhearted butcher Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill), innkeeper Beth Pennock (Hong Chau), Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), or an American newcomer, Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon). Lily and her flocculent compatriots must put Officer Derry through his paces, slipping him clues at key moments and working through the strife within their own flock in order to bring George’s killer to justice.

George (Hugh Jackman), pre-murder. (Courtesy Amazon MGM Studios)

The Sheep Detectives is one of those movies that just gets all the small things perfectly right, that perfectly times each joke, that perfectly hides funny little things in the background. As when Sebastian asks if the sheep know what a human calls a particularly stupid person and one of the sheep shouts, “Duck!” Later—and I don’t even know if this counts as a joke, precisely—characters walk past big neon lettering announcing that neon signs in the town are discounted, only to notice that, for some reason, this tiny British village has a neon “POLICE STATION” sign, a neon sign above the butcher’s shop, etc. But once you see it, you realize the care that went into creating this little world. Screenwriter Craig Mazin, adapting Leonie Swann’s novel, and director Kyle Balda (who has directed several entries in the Minions/Despicable Me catalogue), have just crafted a really efficient entertainment good for ages 9 to 99.

The desire to play broadly leads to some fairly broad performances, particularly by Braun, best known as Cousin Greg from Succession, and Nicholas Galitzine as a traveling reporter hoping to make a name for himself on the back of George’s murder. They should take a lesson from Emma Thompson, who perfectly nails the arch patter of attorney Lydia Harbottle: She’s clipped and pointed and a hair away from winking at the screen, yet the precision of her affect keeps things tolerable. And Gordon, following up on her excellent work in The Bear, brings a sort of sorrowful soulfulness to Rebecca.

Again, the film is occasionally unsubtle in its messaging; the running bit about prejudice against winter lambs is somewhat on the nose. At the risk of reading too much into the messaging—after all, this is a film about shepherds and flocks and the meekest doing the greatest work and acceptance of outcasts and the such—it feels like a profoundly Christian film. Not in an overtly theological manner, mind you, just in the general symbolism. It is the second murder-mystery in the last half-year to wrestle with questions of faith and justice.

More importantly, though, The Sheep Detectives is just fun. It’s clever without being cloying, occasionally dark and tense without being too scary for the younger crowd. It is good family fun for all ages, in an era desperately needing more such films.