Film review: The Sheep Detectives

I didn’t have Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives on my bingo card for 2026 as an endearing crowd-pleaser. Sure, political instability everywhere, given the level of world leaders the general population keeps voting for. After the pandemic, no amount of online vitriol can surprise me. There’s a new virus developing on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Sure, why not? A world leader doing diplomacy through social media posts with f-bombs? Nothing new. A film about a flock of talking sleuth sheep investigating the murder of their shepherd is the safest recommendation for a good family time at the movies this year? Hang on, what? What if I tell you that this is not only produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (from Project Hail Mary fame) but written by none other than Craig Mazin, taking a break from helming Chornobyl and The Last of Us? Do I have your attention now?

I imagine the pitch for this project was just a single sentence on a napkin. “Knives Out, but it’s Babe,” and, thankfully, Mazin’s talent manages to merge the best of those two movies perfectly. The bucolic British rural fantasy of Babe and the entertaining and modern detective take of Knives Out. I wouldn’t peg it as a winning formula, but it goes to show that, as William Goldman once said, in the film industry, no one knows anything.

George (Hugh Jackman) is a shepherd who lives alone in his trailer and is surrounded by his flock of sheep and rams. In the film’s prologue, he writes a letter to someone, detailing the simple and lovely aspects of his life, including the names of all his animals and how, every night, he reads them a chapter of a detective novel. George doesn’t have a good opinion of the humans in town, especially Caleb (Tosin Cole), another shepherd who is trying to include George in a new business deal, Ham the Butcher (Conleth Hill) and the local priest, Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). When George is found dead outside of his trailer, it’s up to the local police officer, Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), to investigate the case with the help of a journalist (Nicholas Galitzine), and George’s sheep, whose knowledge of the literary genre helps them find clues and direct the police to them.

So the sheep. Surprisingly emotive for such heavy CGI, each has its own personality. The leader is Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), whom George called the most intelligent of the group. The rest of them are expertly characterised by their voice actors (including Patrick Stewart, Regina Hall and Bella Ramsay). Still, I want to highlight the lonely ram Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), and my favourites, twin rams with a heavy cockney accent named, obviously, Ronnie and Reggie (Brett Goldstein).

For such a silly premise, Mazin makes the perfect choice by approaching it with honesty. The Sheep Detectives lives in the Aesopian realm of fables, but dropped into the real world of humans. So the sheep are characterised very simply, their community governed by straightforward rules (communal memory lapses to hide trauma is an interesting one, but the crux of the emotional heart of the film is that the sheep ignore a little lamb just because he was born in Winter). The humans, though, have destructive emotions, jealousy and heartbreak (Hong Chau plays a hotel owner with strong feelings for George). Central to this is the arrival of George’s solicitor (Thompson), who reveals that that his unexpected fortune is to be shared by his two estranged children, whom he had given up for adoption: Rebecca (Molly Gordon) and Peter (absent in South Africa).

As the sheep use their skills to find the killer, Mazin, in the classical fable tradition, takes the opportunity to introduce endearing moral lessons. This isn’t just a crowd-pleaser; it has the same educational value of a good bedtime story. The script is tight and well-constructed, and eventually delivers the emotional goods. In this case, a fantastic scene near the end of the second act that tugs the right strings even on the coldest heart. In the screening I attended, you could hear children weeping and adults unashamedly sniffing.

If there’s a nit I want to pick, is how accents of the actors remove the idea of a full-fledged community that I think the film deserved. The spirit is very much that of the southern English countryside, but Braun’s posh British accent sounds like it comes from a different film or a parody of this one, and the sheep mix of American with regional British twang does little to sell the sheep as a strong group.

But why am I even nitpicking a film about talking sheep? What’s the point? It reaches a level of children’s entertainment to know whether the project is at all offensive or idiotic. And if none of those, it doesn’t need to be a masterpiece to deserve to be noticed. And The Sheep Detective earns our attention.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5

For anyone who has been waiting for a chance to introduce their children to the pleasures of whodunnits. Here’s your chance while they’re too young to have read the complete works of Agatha Christie.