I went in skeptical. I walked out delighted.
Four seats to my right, a young couple had brought a blanket to the theater. They unfolded it as the lights came down and burrowed in like it was a Sunday afternoon at home.
The Sheep Detectives, Kyle Balda’s first live-action feature, is that kind of movie. It adapts Leonie Swann’s novel Three Bags Full into a whodunit solved by a flock of CGI sheep. Craig Mazin wrote the script. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, fresh off Project Hail Mary, are aboard as producers. I went in skeptical. I walked out delighted.
Hugh Jackman plays George, a solitary shepherd who reads detective novels aloud to his flock every night. He assumes the words wash over them. They don’t. When George is murdered, the ovine pupils he unwittingly trained as armchair sleuths set out to solve it themselves.
The sheep are the reason to see this. Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices Lily, the cleverest of the flock, with a vulnerability you wouldn’t expect from Selina Meyer. Bryan Cranston is gruff and tender as Sebastian, a loner ram with a buried past. Patrick Stewart, Chris O’Dowd, Brett Goldstein, Regina Hall, and Rhys Darby round out the meadow with personalities of their own. The visual effects, which could have easily collapsed into uncanny mush, achieve the much harder thing: weight. These creatures move through their landscape, and you believe them.
When the local constable, Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), proves incapable of solving anything more demanding than the death of a houseplant, Lily and her companions decide they will have to do it themselves. What surprised me was the moral substance beneath the whimsy. “Sheep don’t die,” Lily says. “They turn into clouds.” She delivers the line the way you’d say the sky is blue. The flock has cultivated, almost as a way of life, a willed forgetfulness about anything painful, and the cloud is its tidy resolution.
That temptation is hardly confined to the meadow. We have our own clouds, and our own talent for looking past what hurts. George’s death is the wound that breaks that spell, and what Lily does with it gives the film a gravity Balda has earned by the time it arrives. The looking, the film quietly insists, is what makes the rest mean anything.
The whodunit isn’t reaching for Agatha Christie, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. Villagers come in types more than dimensions, with Emma Thompson gamely amused as George’s lawyer. The suspects play out about as you’d guess, and once you spot the lonely Winter Lamb you can chart his arc to the closing credits. That hardly matters. The Sheep Detectives’ pleasures are in the meadow, and the meadow is where Balda and Mazin spend their best minutes.
A warm family film willing to sit with grief alongside its silliness is rarer than it should be. That young couple, it turned out, had packed for a colder film.
