‘The Sheep Detectives’ Review: Digital Barnyard Animals Solve a Murder in a Cozy Mystery for the Whole Flock

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston play British sheep turned ace detectives when their shepherd (Hugh Jackman) dies under mysterious circumstances.

There’s currently one solid film out in theaters that uses barnyard animals as a vehicle to explore the dangers of groupthink and anti-intellectualism, and that film is not the one adapted from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” It’s “The Sheep Detectives,” a cute, funny, and earnest mystery that plays like a kiddie version of an Agatha Christie novel, offering audiences who might be too young for the religious trauma and “eat the rich” satire of your average “Knives Out” film an easy starting point into the whodunit genre. And if its vision of a (remarkably sunny and cheery) British countryside sometimes feels a bit too sanitized, director Kyle Balda (in his first non “Minions” or “Despicable Me” movie) adds in just enough hard truths and wisdom to keep the adults in the audience occupied as well.

Adapted by screenwriter Craig Mazin (in a drastically different mode than “Chernobyl” or “The Last of Us”) from a 2005 novel by Leonie Swann, “The Sheep Detectives” trades out Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple in favor of an unusual group of investigators, a large herd of sheep belonging to the reclusive but kindly shepherd George Hardy (Hugh Jackman), who lives not so much on a farm as he does a mobile tractor. The group, loosely led by inquisitive ginger breed Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and good-natured merino Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) enjoy a peaceful existence, with their favorite pastimes consisting of laying in the grass and listening to George read a nightly murder mystery story.

The latter activity gives them some solid ground to plant their hooves on when George abruptly turns up dead one morning, poisoned by an unknown suspect. The nearby town of Denbrook is crawling with suspects: a hardened innkeeper (Hong Chau), a more profit-obsessed (and, uh, meat-loving) shepherd (Tosin Cole), a butcher (Conleth Hill) who George despised, and, most conveniently, George’s secret American daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon), turning up in the sleepy British community right as her father dies. The two investigators — bumbling local policeman Tim (Nicholas Braun, with a shaky English lilt) and ambitious reporter Elliot (Nicholas Galitzine) — don’t inspire much confidence, so Lily, who has always prided herself on figuring out the reveals of George’s novels before they arrived, sets out to find the answers herself, and hopefully steer the humans in the right direction.

Much of what makes a mystery satisfying has to do with managing to make the outcome both surprising and satisfying, something you need to think about but is able to be intuited based on all the careful bits of evidence strung through the story. “The Sheep Detectives” doesn’t quite manage to nail it, exactly, although it gets relatively close. Similar to the recent “Knives Out” movies, the film struggles to balance its ensemble and turn every member into a believable suspect. After the rogue’s gallery is introduced early on, nearly everyone except for Tim, Elliot, and Rebecca fades into the background, although delightfully, Emma Thompson nails her brief comedic role as a brusque solicitor handling George’s last will and testament.

With such a limited amount of satisfying ways for the mystery to conclude, the red herrings aren’t difficult to wade through, and the killer reveal proves relatively easy to spot coming (“The Last of Sheila,” this ain’t). But perhaps judged by the standards of a more family-friendly, beginner take on the murder mystery, the story’s fairly obvious outcome is a bit more understandable, providing a gentle mystery that all audiences can lightly puzzle over.

And, anyway, when you make a film called “The Sheep Detectives,” all the human business matters less than how the woolly investigators interpret and interact with it. While the CGI used to create the flock tends to be somewhat spotty, with moments where the ewes and rams directly interact with humans proving particularly awkward, for the most part, they’re an adorable and colorful little bunch, with easy-to-grasp and strongly defined personalities that make their bickering and shouting and braying fun rather than grating. The film assembled a particularly strong voice cast, albeit one confusingly filled with American accents, to add some character and emotion where the stiffly realistic facial expressions sometimes falter, from Louis-Dreyfus’ peppy Lily to Regina Hall’s pampered Cloud to Brett Goldstein as two very aggressive twin rams.

The film derives a lot of its most successful humor from Lily and Mopple’s outside perspective of the human world they’re stumbling into, as they wrap themselves around big concepts with “God” in utter confusion as to how he can be a shepherd but also a son but also invisible but also bread. Mazin’s script is able to come up with nimble ways to keep the sheep involved in shepherding Tim (whose baffled growing appreciation for their help is one of the film’s funniest bits) through the investigation, while Lily’s murder mystery fandom gives the film an excuse to lightly hang a hat on the various clichés it nonetheless gleefully fulfills. Only occasionally does the film go too broad, mainly when it devolves a situation into a lamb running around and wrecking a room rather than finding a more elegant button to a setpiece.

If “The Sheep Detectives” were just a gimmicky movie about a flock solving a human murder, it would still be a relatively fun time. But this little tale has a surprising amount of heart and intelligence, in how it uses its genre to explore the importance of facing reality and accepting hard truths. For all the flock’s peace, there are obvious issues with how they operate as a group, shunning a young “winter lamb” and treating the ram Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), adopted into the flock by George after a hard life, with obvious distance. Whenever the group is confronted with uncomfortable situations, they will themselves to forget, leaving just Mopple to retain all the bad memories.

As much as Lily fancies herself a detective, she’s just as guilty as the rest of the flock for following the herd rather than confronting the truth. To become a great detective and solve George’s murder, Sebastian advises her to step outside her comfort zone and face reality rather than putting her head in the grass. Learning how to face difficult emotions as a natural part of life: that’s a great lesson to teach kids, just as much as how to solve their first whodunit.

Grade: B

From Amazon MGM Studios, “The Sheep Detectives” is now playing in theaters.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.