The Private Eyes That Made Me Cry

Compared with cinema’s menagerie of big-city talking animals, the ovine stars of the movie The Sheep Detectives lead idyllic lives: They sleep among cozy bales of hay. They graze on the English countryside’s beautiful, grassy hills. Each has been thoughtfully named by their beloved shepherd, George (played by Hugh Jackman)—there’s Lily, Mopple, Sebastian, Cloud, Ronnie, Reggie, Wool Eyes, Sir Ritchfield, and Zora. And every night, George reads murder-mystery novels to them; the flock has come to appreciate what makes a good whodunit.At first glance, the movie they’re in seems like the kind of unassuming barnyard romp made mostly to amuse kids—until George is murdered one horrible evening, leaving his fluffy family unmoored. The sheep decide to investigate his death, but their choice to become gumshoes turns out to be the least unexpected development in the film. Based on the novel Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann, The Sheep Detectives is an audacious fable about how joy and sorrow go hoof in hoof. Much of the mystery that unspools will seem familiar to anyone who’s ever cracked open an Agatha Christie novel, and the sheep’s antics will bring to mind the many verbal animals across cinematic history: Paddington, Babe the pig, Charlotte with her web. But such nostalgic warmth only enhances the film’s sweetness. The result may just be the most tonally surprising feature of the year so far, a rare, unabashedly earnest PG-rated film that has enchanted audiences with the deceptively simple power of well-deployed tropes.[Read: A very silly movie about some very good dogs]The script, by the Chernobyl and The Last of Us writer Craig Mazin, deploys common notions about whodunits and talking-animal tales to its advantage. Several of the human suspects may appear to be obvious threats, but they are often in need of shepherds of their own. Even the butcher, who heads to George’s farm after the shepherd’s demise to scout how many creatures he may be able to slaughter, falls asleep