The Sheep Detectives (2026)

Ewedunit

Any parent can tell you that there is an utter abundance of bad movies and TV shows made for kids. I suppose that’s true of any corpus aimed at any audience, but for some reason the bad ones aimed at kids are uniquely brutal. They pander. They insult the intelligence of bright, curious children. And then, because kids are pattern-seeking little creatures, they get played on a loop until the parent can recite the whole thing from memory. But a movie or show or book made for kids that finds sufficient charm or wit or heart becomes something timeless, something to hold onto. If it’s good enough, it grows with you, and eventually you hand it down, the way I’ve shown A Goofy Movie to my two daughters and read them Charlotte’s Web. What I’m trying to say is that I would not be astonished if, thirty years from now, my daughters spent a Friday night showing their own kids The Sheep Detectives.

That’s lofty praise, and I don’t want to get carried away. This is not quite the magical family movie of a generation, though looking around, I can’t see too many non-animated competitors (and, to be fair, I haven’t seen the beloved Paddingtons). It is, however, pretty authentically great, and it pulls off an impressive feat of tonal acrobatics, juggling a half dozen threads and concepts — e.g. talking animals are funny, a murder has shaken this small town, is there a God — and somehow making all of them feel like they intuitively belong not just in the same film but in the same scene.

George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) is a shepherd in the picture-book English village of Denbrook who reads detective novels aloud to his flock every night, secure in the assumption that they can’t possibly understand him. They can. When George turns up dead in his field, the sheep, who have absorbed years of mystery-novel mechanics and precisely zero real-world context, decide to solve it themselves, in parallel with a local police force consisting entirely of Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), who has never investigated anything more serious than a parking complaint. Aiding Derry is scrappy journalist Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine). The result is both a compelling mystery and a hilarious series of misadventures by a flock of clueless sheep, which is a narrow needle to thread.

What surprised me is how many layers sit underneath the whodunit. The Sheep Detectives has a heavy undercurrent of spiritual interrogation running through it. The sheep have their own mythology about the afterlife, and they spend the duration of the film sorting through it. Any story involving shepherds and flocks is going to accumulate religious undertones whether it wants them or not, and this one definitely wants them. The sheep in this universe possess a specific biological/spiritual gift: with a small bit of mental exertion, they can force themselves to forget a painful memory. It’s less a superpower than a fitness activity, like massaging out a cramp in the brain, and the effect is that they get hit with the Men in Black neuralyzer on demand. This means that all but a small handful of them are entirely ignorant of death, having wiped away every scrap of grief they’ve ever encountered.

When George dies, they are staring grief in the face for what they believe to be the first time, completely incapable of making sense of it. The film’s best idea is that we are stronger for taking loss head on, that grappling with hard feelings is part of the deal of being alive, and that the departed don’t simply become clouds we wave goodbye to then never think of again. They are everywhere and they are inside us in real and inescapable ways.

Stacked on top of all that is the meta layer, which I have to assume is the fingerprint of executive producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, whose postmodern instincts are relentless. The sheep only know what a mystery is because George read them one every night, so they process each new event and revelation strictly according to the mystery story formula. Every clue gets filed against the genre template. It’s both a running gag and a surprisingly durable structure, always pointing the sheep to the next story event in clever ways. Craig Mazin’s script is disciplined enough to make it work in both directions: he honors fair-play mystery construction, laying out every clue for an attentive viewer, while the sheep loudly misinterpret the ones right in front of them. Coming from the man who wrote both Chernobyl and Scary Movie 3, this may be the most complete synthesis of his career.

The movie’s biggest downside is that the movie is so busy, it doesn’t have a chance to really develop the flock itself. Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a terrific lead, balancing wit and real feeling, and Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) as the reclusive black sheep and Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) as the one who can’t forget both have clear functions and clear voices. But the rest are well-voiced and memorably introduced and then largely left to mill around, which leaves a persistent sense of missed potential: this could have been a genuinely wonderful ensemble of talking animals, and is instead a bit shallow. The film’s lineup of human suspects and red herrings is also a bit perfunctory rather than sparky, though that’s par for the course in any Agatha Christie-like story.

Thankfully, the sparky stuff is very sparky. Braun is outstanding in this: He carries every scene he’s in, nails the tone the film needs from its bumbling but sympathetic authority figure, and does it in a charming fake English accent. Director Kyle Balda gets plenty of comic mileage out of Braun’s 6’7″ frame folding itself into small country interiors. Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson) turns up for a will-reading at her crisp, imperious, governessy best, and ends up being exactly the correct amount of Emma Thompson so she doesn’t overwhelm the movie. And Jackman, in a brief and deliberately front-loaded performance, grounds the affair with real warmth and soft sadness.

Balda is making his live-action debut here after the Minions pictures and Despicable Me 3, and his experience maneuvering CGI animation is part of the film’s success. The sheep, animated by British effects studio Framestore, are convincing not just in fur but in weight and mass, to the point I occasionally wondered if the animation was supplemented with real models or even real animals. George Steel shoots the Buckinghamshire countryside in a lush, cozy register, and Christophe Beck’s score is playful without narrating the jokes. Even the studio logo is in on the fun: the MGM lion opens the film with a baa instead of a roar.

It doesn’t quite reach the heights of its very obvious inspiration, Babe. But, frankly, few films reach that level of storybook magic, and the fact that Sheep Detectives lands in the same zip code is notable. This navigates to a tricky balance of being genuinely all-ages, honest but not morbid about death, and is direct about where meat comes (which I appreciate as a vegetarian; let kids know what nuggets and lamb chops really are). But this is a real throwback to a warmer and more ambitious era of family filmmaking made by people who trusted kids to sit with tough ideas the same way old fairy tales did. I take some comfort in the image of two grown women and their kids screening and discussing this film thirty years from now, watching a flock of sheep slowly bumble their way toward truth, not unlike the human race. That’ll do.

Is It Good?

Very Good (6/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.