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I’m not quite sure how to conceptualise the pipeline between the harrowing 2019 mini-series Chernobyl and The Sheep Detectives, but here we are: writer Craig Mazin – who not only created Chernobyl but its bleak spiritual companion, the post-apocalyptic The Last of Us – has adapted for screen Leonie Swann’s German bestseller Three Bags Full, in which a flock of sheep solve their shepherd’s murder.
Mazin, it should be pointed out, first got his start in the Scary Movie and Hangover franchises, and is here paired with Minions director Kyle Balda. Yet the Mazin who coaxed sombre performances out of Pedro Pascal and Jared Harris ends up at the wheel far more than you’d expect for a film, well, about detectives who are sheep. There’s an entire meditation on the nature of morality and memory being bleated out by CGI creatures who, though rendered with loving detail, clearly never make physical contact with any person or object around them.
It’s a bit much, to be frank. But at the time, the all-hands-aboard desire to take so absurd a premise and insist it be about something offers its Midsomer Murders-lite world a sense of weight and substance. The melodrama helps land the comedy. And there’s some real charm to be found here. We’re introduced to a twinkly eyed Hugh Jackman as farmer George Hardy, who reads detective novels each night to his flock, and has made an enemy of every local in the village of Denbrook, including the rival shepherd (Tosin Cole), the butcher (Conleth Hill), the innkeeper (Hong Chau), and the priest (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith).
When George turns up dead, the smartest of his ewes, Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), must not only solve the crime but wrestle with the very fact of death. Sheep, we’re told, have been blessed with the useful ability to wipe their memory on command (all but one, Mopple, voiced by Chris O’Dowd), and choose to believe that they and all their predecessors simply turn into clouds at the end of their mortal life.
Hugh Jackman (and talking lamb) in ‘The Sheep Detectives’ (Amazon MGM Studios)
Lily has to also figure out how to share her detective work with the local constabulary, Tim Derry (Succession’s Nicholas Braun, who doesn’t quite nail the accent but whose wide-eyed stammer, like a freshly caught fish, feels deeply and spiritually British). Sheep understand English, but can’t talk back. So, not only does Tim have to deal with new arrivals in the form of George’s long-lost daughter (Molly Gordon), his lawyer (Emma Thompson), and a meddlesome local journalist (Nicholas Galitzine), but with the fact the village is now ominously filled with sheep threatening a cloven-hoofed take on Hitchcock’s The Birds.
If there’s an advantage to packing your film full of famous faces and voices – other sheep are played by Patrick Stewart, Regina Hall, The Last of Us’s Bella Ramsey, and Bryan Cranston doing a note-for-note rehash of his Isle of Dogs lone ranger role – it’s that they’re able to delicately work a tone that’s trying to exist somewhere in the space between Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and Clue (1985), while also landing what might be the first funny “why did the chicken cross the road?” gag in a decade.
Chris O’Dowd and Julia Louis-Dreyfus lend voices to sheep in ‘The Sheep Detectives’ (Amazon MGM Studios)
It’s a distinctly American viewpoint on British rural life, with a cheery, fairytale colour palette provided by costume designer Rosa Dias. Only an American, really, would name a pair of fighting rams in a family film after the infamous Kray twins (both voiced here by Brett Goldstein) and forget that the Anglicans rejected transubstantiation. But The Sheep Detectives could certainly have done a lot worse for a breezy, easy murder mystery. It could have been written by Harlan Coben.
Dir: Kyle Balda. Starring: Hugh Jackman, Nicholas Braun, Nicholas Galitzine, Molly Gordon, Hong Chau, Emma Thompson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart, Bella Ramsey, Brett Goldstein. Cert PG, 109 minutes.
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‘The Sheep Detectives’ is in cinemas from 8 May, with special previews between 2 and 4 May