The Sheep Detectives Review: Ovine Murder Mystery Is As Delightfully Silly As Warm

Watching Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives, you realise cinema, in these fractured times, can still hold out innocence and pure joy. A film with animals as its leads can radiate a sublime loveliness that also lightly bounces back the world’s chasms. Based on Leonie Swann’s bestseller, Three Bags Full, this film has oodles of heart and buoyant wit to melt the toughest of cynics.

Anthropomorphised animals in cinema are a tricky sell. The template has been overused to such an extent its effects can be eye-glazing. What The Sheep Detectives does is miraculous. It has sweetness and candour, vivacity and simplicity. Balda bathes it in an Arcadian glow, the tint of a childhood fable. The stakes are real. There’s a killer looming. But the humour coating the narrative remains genial. The murder of a shepherd in a small English town, George Hardy (Hugh Jackman), gets his talking flock buzzing as to who the killer is.

The exposition is irresistible. Hardy introduces the sheep, singling out Lily (voiced by a sensational Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the smartest one who’s also geared to his feelings. The other is a loner, Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), with whom Hardy confesses sharing a spiritual kinship. Hardy lives out of a mobile home, tucked far from the town, Denbrook’s dealings. He’s happy being on the outskirts, among the animals. His world revolves around his flock. He meets their needs with kindness and unflagging readiness. Every dusk, the sheep gather to listen to him read out a snug detective story. Lily always cracks the case before the ending. Fittingly, she takes the lead in unravelling Hardy’s death.

Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), a junior reporter who landed in Denbrook for covering the local festival, nudges the local cop, Tim (Nicholas Braun) into confronting it’s a murder case. Braun is an utter hoot as a daft cop who slowly finds his moorings and confidence. Tim is one of those archetypal bumbling police officers that get the sniggers. He seems to have no clue on basic police protocol, staggering through the immediate aftermath of a murder. More players roll in: a church priest, a butcher, a rival shepherd, an innkeeper (Hong Chau), George’s attorney (a characteristically sharp-tongued Emma Thompson), his daughter whom he’d given up for adoption via the church, Rebecca (Molly Gordon). The human characters are mostly sketchy and forgettable, though it’s a crackling ensemble. Galitzine and Braun make the strongest impression, both dialling the amiability high. Nevertheless, it’s the sheep steering the film with personality and dry judgement. A slew of cheeky moments abounds. Watch out for a pivotal scene where the sheep are about to make their first footing on asphalt. They are riven with panic and consternation with quivering hooves that know only to trod on grass. But it becomes the first step in getting out and exploring the wide world.

It can be risky to balance and measure the degree of cuteness. Inherently, it holds the possibility of tipping over into corny tripe. But Balda pulls it off with such a sincere hand it’s impossible not to be charmed, riveted and moved. It’s so emotionally credible you’d be hard-pressed not to bat away a tear as the animals face one opposition after another, a string of losses that drive home truths.

I haven’t read Swann’s novel, but Craig Mazin, who has adapted it, accentuates smart, subtle comments on an exclusionary politics that’s sweeping every country right now. Cutting beyond a pleasing, inoffensive mystery, its heart stays close to anxieties and tensions around belonging. Who’s believed to be part of a family? Who’s shunted, pushed out? Lines of conflict and difference thrum through the sheep, a stark mirror of what humans have been doing since ages.

Central to the film is the clear divide that sets a young winter lamb apart from the flock. Most of the animals are spring sheep. They band together. For all her sharpness, Lily too has to battle her prejudice and welcome the winter lamb in their folds. His suggestions are dismissed just as she is occasionally undermined by an elderly ram who advises her to stick to feminine tasks. The Sheep Detectives combines such experiences of being slighted and sidelined with a denied bereavement. The sheep, accustomed to discarding painful, uncomfortable memories, learn that “it’s our memory that keeps the ones we love alive”. The warmth, the open-heartedness of this film feels immediate and incredibly dear.