No Joke, The Sheep Detectives Is One Of The Best Movies Of The Year
No ifs, ands, or baaahs about it.
What if I told you one of the best movies of the year involved talking sheep working to solve the murder of their shepherd, played by Hugh Jackman? You’d probably say that I was crazy, or had terrible movie taste, or that I’m still suffering from the same concussion that made me dream up a movie about talking sheep detectives. But no, there is a clear winner for the best movie of the year so far, and it’s a real (not fake) movie called The Sheep Detectives.
Directed by Minions director Kyle Balda and written by Craig Mazin (yes, of Chernobyl and The Last of Us fame), The Sheep Detectives shouldn’t work. With its bright, oversaturated color palette, unapologetically twee tone, and a star-studded cast of various Americans doing British accents, on paper, The Sheep Detectives seemed more like a movie created as a fever-brained skit on 30 Rock. But instead, The Sheep Detectives feels like it was expressly created to destroy audiences’ current irony-poisoned attitude. Because beneath its silly premise and a handful of truly baffling accents, The Sheep Detectives is a deeply earnest, tender, and wistful exploration of grief and mortality.
Based on Leonie Swann’s hit German novel Three Bags Full, The Sheep Detectives can best be described as Paddington and Babe meets Knives Out. From the beginning, the film makes you care about each individual sheep because Jackman’s shepherd George Hardy cares about them. There’s Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the Shetland sheep that displays remarkable intelligence. There’s Mopple (Chris O'Dowd), a Merino sheep who never forgets anything and acts as Lily’s second-in-command. Lily leads a pack that includes Cloud (Regina Hall), the vain North Country Cheviot sheep; Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart), an elderly Boreray sheep; and the twin Norfolk Horn sheep Reggie and Ronnie (both voiced by Brett Goldstein), who love nothing more than to bash things with their horns. It’s an idyllic life — they spend their days peacefully wandering the rural English pastures they call home, before settling in for George’s nightly mystery novel readings. They’ve never known grief or mortality, sheep don’t pass away, they simply become clouds in the sky.
But the two sheep on the outside looking in tell a different story: the gruff black sheep Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), who rebuffs Lily’s attempt to include him in the pack, scorns the herd’s carefree life. And there’s of course, the unnamed Winter Lamb (Tommy Birchall), an orphaned baby lamb constantly shunned by the pack.
But this breezy life is brought to a sudden halt when one day, Lily discovers George lying dead. Distraught, she tries to do what all sheep do when confronted with something distressing: she tries to wipe it from her memory. But something stops her — there’s something odd about his passing. There’s green paint on his hands and a sign of a struggle. Lily knows all the signs of a murder mystery when she sees one, and when a lawyer (Emma Thompson) and a long-lost daughter (Molly Gordon) come to town to introduce a succession plot, that’s when Lily knows something is afoot. She just has to figure out what part the priest (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), the innkeeper (Hong Chau), the rival shepherd (Tosin Cole), and the hapless visiting journalist (Nicholas Galitzine) all have to do with it. And to make the case even more of a challenge, the local village police officer (Nicholas Braun) is an idiot.
The dynamic (human) duo try to solve the mystery of George Hardy’s murder.
As a straightforward whodunit, The Sheep Detectives works wonderfully, pulling out all the stops when it comes to screwball comedy moments and quirky Britishisms. But its greatest magic trick, apart from making us wildly invested in the antics of the mystery-solving sheep, is how brilliantly it hits its emotional beats. Like its spiritual predecessor, Paddington, there’s a deep kindness and authenticity with which it treats its characters. Its stakes may be relatively low, but they feel large because this is all the world these sheep know. So by the time the grand finale rolls around — and the culprits have been revealed in true shocking whodunit fashion — you’re still ready to cry over the fate of a winter sheep.
They don’t make movies like The Sheep Detectives anymore, and that may be why so many (including yours truly) were ready to write it off. It's silly, it's unpretentious, and it's painfully earnest. It’s the final remnant of a long-lost era of family films that doesn’t talk down to children and takes its audience seriously, and only asks that you take it seriously too. And yes, that includes the concept of sheep solving mysteries.
