It’s hard to pin down the first detective story ever written, but whether you credit “The Three Apples” from “One Thousand and One Nights” or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” one thing is certain: There weren’t enough sheep.
Yes, the mystery genre as we know it is vast and varied, but until recently even the best detective stories were relatively sheepless. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote “Shear-lock Holmes,” Raymond Chandler never wrote “The Big Sheep,” and even “The Silence of the Lambs” was surprisingly lean in the lamb department. If it wasn’t for Leonie Swann’s 2005 German novel “Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story,” and Kyle Balda’s new feature film adaptation “The Sheep Detectives,” we might never have known what we were missing. As cozy farm animal detective stories go, it simply can’t be bleat.
“The Sheep Detectives” tells the story of three sheep — Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) and Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) — who live in a pasture with their flock and their kindly owner, George (Hugh Jackman). George reads mystery novels to his sheep every night, but when he dies under mysterious circumstances, and when the local lawman (Nicholas Braun) proves he’s clueless, Lily decides to solve the mystery herself.
Lily knows everything there is to know about the detective genre but she doesn’t know anything about life outside the farm. In fact, before George died she didn’t know what death actually was. It turns out sheep have the unique ability to forget anything they want, at will, so every time something unpleasant happens they simply blot it out. They don’t even know sheep can die. They just assume they eventually all turn into clouds.
The “cozy mystery” has always been a bit of a paradox, because it’s supposed to be a comforting genre but there’s also usually a murder, and that’s not comforting at all. “The Sheep Detectives” is definitely a cozy mystery. It’s got all the adorably twee trapping. And yet it’s also about that paradox. It’s a film about talking sheep solving a bloodless murder in a tiny town full of kooky characters but the story goes out of its way to stare death in the face. People die. Animals die. And over the course of the film Iris grows up, from naive ewe to practically worldly — excuse me, “wool-dly.”
That streak of genuine drama could have been this film’s undoing, since surely a movie called “The Sheep Detectives” would have the “all-ages” label pasted all over it. Despite the hang-ups about mortality there’s a lot of whimsy around every corner. The adorable farm animals struggle to understand human culture and get into all sorts of slapstick shenanigans. The cast of human characters are all quirky, almost all the time, and cinematographer George Steel films the action with a bright, colorful, storybook veneer that’s perfect for family-friendly fare.
But “family-friendly” doesn’t have to mean “toothless.” Many of the most celebrated family films have a dark streak, from “Bambi” to “The Secret of NIMH” to “Babe.” Kyle Balda knows how to make his film feel fluffy, which it usually does, but at the center of the story there’s still a dead body and that makes death fair game.
Speaking of playing fair: The detective part of “The Sheep Detectives” is surprisingly clever. That’s not to say astute audience members won’t be able figure it out before the big reveal, but real effort went into making sure this mystery couldn’t be solved unless the characters are genuinely clever. Not every cozy mystery can boast that.
Of course, you can’t solve a mystery without suspects, and boy are there a lot of suspects. There’s a befuddled novice reporter (Nicholas Galitzine), a condescending lawyer (Emma Thompson), a love-lorn shopkeep (Hong Chau), a rival sheepherder (Tosin Cole), a scary butcher (Conleth Hill), a guilty priest (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) and George’s hitherto-unknown daughter (Molly Gordon). All that’s missing is a busybody neighbor and a cat, but I’d argue Lily qualifies as a busybody neighbor and most of her flock are so useless they may as well be pets. Then again, I guess technically they are.
“The Sheep Detectives” is a wonderful film and it’s not a shallow film, which is bound to take a lot of people by surprise. Screenwriter Craig Mazin (“The Last of Us”) knows how to balance the narrative’s smart storyline and tricky tonal shifts, Kyle Balda knows how to bring that tale to life, and the rest of the cast and crew are all on the same page. It’s a remarkable family flick and I suspect it will leave a lasting impression. Yes, we never had enough sheep detective stories before, but I think we can finally — finally — put the past(ure) behind us.
“The Sheep Detectives” opens exclusively in theaters on May 8.
