The Sheep Detectives: Movie Review

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Bryan Cranston, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Emma Thompson, Nicholas Galitzine, Patrick Stewart, Hong Chau
Director: Kyle Balda

Imagine a film that takes the talking animal genius of Babe and fuses it with the kind of chocolate box cosy crime dramas, such as The Thursday Murder Club, that have become the norm in this day and age.

In a nutshell, that's what the charmingly wholesome The Sheep Detectives is, a bucolic slice of simplicity that follows shepherd George, who carries two bottles of milk in a holster belt and lives alone in a field on the outskirts of the idyllic English village of Denbrook.

Each night, at the end of his day tending to his flock, George (Messiah-like and gruff with humans, but soft with his animals) reads detective novels to the wooly masses and unbeknownst to him, has a thrilled and captivated audience. When the sheep awake one day to find George slumped in a field, they suspect he has been murdered and raised on a diet of grass and crime stories, Lily (Louis-Dreyfus) sets out to solve the crime.

Chernobyl screenwriter Craig Mazin wastes no time setting up a whole ewe-niverse within Denbrook as he adapts German crime author Leonie Swann's 2022 book Three Bags Full. From the nosey shopkeeper to the malevolent-looking butcher, everyone's a suspect and in the style of Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, even the local law enforcement (Nicholas Braun) is clueless.

This is a story that very much conforms to the norms of the cosy crime world, raising the tropes and acknowledging them without subverting them, before ploughing it all through a wooly prism.

And yet, there's some darkness within the sentimental message of never forgetting those that are left behind. From outcast animals to the sheep's desire to simply stop remembering anything they don't like, along with ideologies on death and the negation of the horrors of farm life, this is a film that teeters on nightmarish moments - even if its key one is ripped directly from the most horrifying moment of George Miller's Babe.

Dame Emma Thomson delivers a perfectly pitched performance as a lawyer brought in to execute George's estate, but the real star of the film is the dialogue which has no qualms or compunction about mixing both silly word play with feel-good heartfelt sentiment.

It's perhaps a little too wooly in its duration, but this tale of a field full of Baa-Gatha Christie animals inspired to see their shepherd's killer put behind baa-rs is perhaps the sweetest intentioned film you'll see all year.