Here 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, for some, may be off-putting. Actually, it makes for a sweet-natured family comedy, and a spiky and amusing cameo from Emma Thompson certainly doesn’t hurt.
Screenwriter Craig Mazin has adapted the bestselling book Three Bags Full by German crime author Leonie Swann, and the Despicable Me veteran Kyle Balda directs, shepherding a boisterous herd of live-action stars and digitally created woolly performers. 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 stainless steel 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.
George looks after the sheep, douses them with blue medicine of his own invention and entertains them all with readings from detective stories every night. Perhaps he thinks it is only the inchoate cosy-crime vibe that these creatures enjoy; in fact they understand English perfectly well, but they just can’t speak it.
Among the sheep are Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Mopple (Chris O’Dowd), Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart) and Sebastian (Bryan Cranston). The humans include daft local copper Tim (played by Nicholas Braun; that is, cousin Greg from TV’s Succession, treating us to a perfectly decent Brit accent and performing with aplomb). Also there’s a local butcher (Conleth Hill), rival farmer (Tosin Cole) and grumpy postmistress (Hong Chau).
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.
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 all very silly, although, as with Babe, I have to confess to agnosticism about digital talking animals, even if the technology here is next-level. It’s an entertaining tale of ovine law enforcement.