The Sheep Detectives

May 15 – 21

Fri May 15 – 3:30 & 7:00 pm
Sat May 16 – 7:00 pm
Sun May 17– 1:30 & 7:00 pm
Mon May 18 – 130 & 7:00 pm
Tues May 19 – 7:00 pm
Wed May 20 – 3:30 pm
Thurs May 21 – 7:00 pm

Rated G – 1hr 49min
Family / Comedy / Mystery

The Sheep Detectives is a murder mystery that’s like a cross between Babe and The Thursday Murder Club, in which instead of plucky underdog retirees solving crimes, it’s … sheep? With a touch of Watership Down somewhere in the mix, this film makes for a sweet-natured family comedy, and a spiky and amusing cameo from Emma Thompson certainly doesn’t hurt. The setting is the English village of Denbrook, swathed in what looks like digitally enhanced Californian sunshine, where Hugh Jackman plays George Hardy, a shepherd who lives in an American-looking trailer on his field. George controls his flock without recourse to the traditional dog, but rather with his instinctive relationship with them all. And he is dedicated only to raising sheep for their wool, not their meat – which is not exactly the attitude of the local agribusiness types who have designs on his land.

The entire community is astonished when a murder is committed. Visiting American Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon) is in the frame, and a nosy journalist Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine) is taking an interest. The victim’s formidable lawyer Lydia Harbottle is played by Thompson. But the only denizens of Denbrook who can crack this case are the perspicacious sheep, nosing out clues and bleating and baa-ing in such a way that the humans twig what they’re on to. And this traumatised flock realise that they may have to leave the field they’ve got used to all their lives and abandon their conformist, submissive attitudes.

Based on the 2005 bestselling German novel Three Bags Full,  George is perhaps the most jacked shepherd in history, who lovingly tends to his large flock of sheep that he’s determined never to kill. He’s so fond of them, in fact, that he offers them daily readings of his favorite genre, murder mysteries, for which they sit attentively as if they understand every word.

Screenwriter Craig Mazin retools Swann’s story for a younger audience, stripping out the text’s more violent eccentricities, while preserving the universally winning curiosity of the premise. Alternating a mellow storybook tone in the story’s sheep-centered sections with jaunty Britcom-style humor whenever the focus shifts to human goings-on, the result comes about as close as any adaptation could to being all things to all creatures great and small. The closest likeness here is to the first two Paddington films, extending to Framestore’s seamless creature effects: Some passages in The Sheep Detectives will go over children’s heads to instead tickle their parents, but the sunny good cheer of the enterprise should keep everyone on side.

The great feelgood trick pulled off by this film is that the murder, involving a character we’ve been encouraged to like and invest in emotionally – much more so than in traditional detective stories – doesn’t get swamped with sadness and shock. The film scoots smartly past the death and brings us briskly on to the entertaining business of sheep-oriented crime detection. It’s an entertaining tale of ovine law enforcement.