Kyle Balda’s farmyard whodunnit is funny and unexpectedly moving, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus giving its sheep detective a persuasive voice. The human characters are less convincing, and the cosy mystery sometimes struggles to keep up with the flock.
The Sheep Detectives is a good family comedy with a murder to solve and some awkward conversations about death to get through. Kyle Balda keeps the animals sufficiently sheep-like for their attempts to understand people to be funny, while allowing their distress to matter. The result is warm, odd and worth an evening, provided a watertight whodunnit is not the chief requirement. The human characters could do with some of the same care.
Craig Mazin’s screenplay, adapted from Leonie Swann’s novel, gets its most useful joke from the sheep’s limited understanding of human behaviour. A murder mystery depends on noticing what other people miss, so animals trying to decipher people make plausible investigators within this peculiar set-up. It also means that bewilderment can lead naturally into something sadder. George Hardy, played by Hugh Jackman, matters to the flock as the person who cared for them, and his death is allowed to remain upsetting even while there is a case to pursue.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus gives Lily the determination to carry this without making her sound like a detective who has merely been given wool. There is enough uncertainty in the performance for her growing understanding to cost her something. Chris O’Dowd brings a melancholy intelligence to Mopple, helping the film consider memory without stopping for a lesson. We were moved more than we expected by the flock’s struggle to understand the loss of their shepherd: their dependence on him makes the confusion painful.
The digital sheep are convincing enough that we soon stopped inspecting them and started listening. George Steel’s cinematography keeps the live-action surroundings from overwhelming the digital flock, while Suzie Davies’s production design makes the farm feel sufficiently solid to house them. The visual humour works because the sheep remain recognisably animals, even when the voices are doing complicated emotional work. Kyle Balda knows how much comedy there is in asking a sheep to take something seriously, and generally resists making every moment a demand for affection.
The humans are the chief weakness. Craig Mazin’s script gives them a degree of exaggeration that sits awkwardly beside the care spent on the sheep, and the performances do not always agree about how broadly to play it. Too often, the human ensemble seems to be demonstrating how funny the premise is instead of getting on with the business of a mystery. There is already a flock conducting a murder investigation; additional eccentricity soon becomes a distraction from both the clues and the animals.
Editors Martin Walsh, Al LeVine and Paul Machliss keep the comedy moving briskly, but cannot quite smooth the changes between animal whimsy and straightforward detection. Some passages feel as though the film has remembered another audience it ought to be entertaining. Christophe Beck’s score is an irritation when it keeps signalling how quirky everything is. The quieter emotional scenes need room, and the music sometimes seems reluctant to leave them alone.
As a family film, it earns its place by letting children think about death without immediately distracting them from it. The humour can be precious, and the mystery will not satisfy anyone looking principally for ingenious detection. But the sheep have enough personality to make their worries worth sharing, and the film treats those worries with respect. Choose it for company across the generations, with a little time afterwards for questions about the shepherd.
