The Sheep Detectives’ Is a Charming and Baffling Baby’s First Whodunit

Normally, when someone kicks off a review of a movie with the question “Who is this even for?” it’s a complaint aimed at some misbegotten cash-grab that expects the audience to gratefully turn up despite offering them nothing of value. That’s not the case with The Sheep Detectives, a movie so admirably peculiar it couldn’t possibly be a cash-grab, and yet the question still applies. The bucolic English countryside, teeming with talking sheep and their antics, points to it being a kid’s movie, but those sheep are out to solve a murder, and the whole film is, top to bottom, a whodunit.

Now, violence in children’s entertainment isn’t new. Elmer Fudd only ever wanted to kill that wascally wabbit, and Snow White survived an attempted assassination. By those metrics, The Sheep Detectives is fairly restrained and bloodless. Based on a German novel called Three Bags Full, the film is directed by veteran animator Kyle Balda (Minions, Despicable Me 3) and written by Chernobyl and The Last of Us’s Craig Mazin. When local shepherd George (Hugh Jackman, all sparkly eyes and rolled-up sleeves) is found poisoned in his field, his flock sets out to crack the case. The good news is that George had been reading them murder mysteries every evening before bed, so they know their way around suspects and motives. They just need to figure out how to lead the local constable, the hapless Officer Derry (Nicholas Braun), to the right conclusion.

The fact that The Sheep Detectives boasts a deep bench of talent onscreen will likely be lost on most kids, who won’t waste time wondering why Succession’s Cousin Greg has a wobbly British accent or appreciate Emma Thompson as George’s shark of a lawyer. And while they may enjoy seeing upcoming He-Man himself, Nicholas Galitzine, as a junior reporter who stumbled onto the case, I doubt they’ll enjoy it half as much as I liked seeing Hong Chau as the jealous, lovelorn innkeeper. The cast is mostly for the adults, and that’s not a complaint. How could I ever complain about a movie that delivers Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Bella Ramsey, Rhys Darby, and Brett Goldstein, even if they are all playing sheep? “Why does that ram sound like Walter White?” is another question I didn’t expect to ask about this movie, but it works because the sheep are the heart and soul of the movie and deserve that level of gravitas mixed in with the comedic chops.

Then there’s the mystery, which is both too twisty for kids without an understanding of estate law to grasp, but still sports enough gaping holes in its logic to frustrate adults. George helpfully named all the reasonable suspects in his will, including his two adult children, given away at birth and recently re-discovered, as well as the parish priest, a neighboring shepherd, the local butcher, and the innkeeper - even though he wasn’t expecting to be murdered. And his lawyer happily read an updated copy of the will, discovered at the scene of the murder and bearing her contact details, as if it were valid — despite confirming it wasn’t a legitimate will in the film’s climax. Am I nitpicking? Sure! But that’s what mystery fans do, regardless of the talking sheep distractions.

Of all the baffling decisions in this mostly charming romp, none surprised me more than seeing Mazin’s name in the credits. But it kind of makes sense, right? The hard-to-pin tone, not quite for kids but not quite for adults, reads as the push and pull between Balda and Mazin’s creative strengths, but the fact that the central mystery isn’t quite as smart as it thinks it is - that’s all Mazin (if you watched his talking head segments during The Last of Us making-of featurettes, you know). Still, I’m rooting for this thing. It’s harmless, it’s fun, and it’s the closest we’re gonna get to peak Cornetto Trilogy now that Edgar Wright is off making the big bucks. The Sheep Detectives isn’t as sharp at wielding its genre conventions in the service of comedy or, in this case, children’s entertainment as something like Hot Fuzz was, but it’s close. Good enough to make for Baby’s First Whodunit, at the very least.