Perhaps this was always the logical end point of the cosy crime craze: a rural murder-mystery in which the protagonists themselves are 50 per cent wool. This tame-by-design, family-friendly comic thriller, based on a German novel from 2005, centres on a flock of sheep whose doting shepherd George (Hugh Jackman) is found lying dead in the pasture one morning, so they trot off to the nearby village to work out who killed him.
The Sheep Detectives is a profoundly odd viewing experience – entirely pleasant, lightly funny and easily absorbed, yet every so often you find yourself thinking hang on a minute, I am watching a flock of sheep investigate a murder, and feel like you are having a stroke.
Talking sheep, at that. The surreality is only heightened by the voice casting, which has been carried out with an eye on the international market. There are sheep here played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston and Regina Hall: the sort of all-star Hollywood line-up you’d expect from a Madagascar or a Kung Fu Panda, but which sounds ear-janglingly bizarre against a backdrop of gently rolling Home Counties pasture. (Patrick Stewart, Chris O’Dowd, Bella Ramsey, Brett Goldstein and Rhys Darby prove better fits.)
Not that strict social realism is on the agenda elsewhere, though. The village in which the mystery unfolds looks like it’s being swept on an hourly basis, and boasts a population whose class and ethnic make-up suggests they moved there en masse from Crouch End, north London, last week.
The only actual newcomer, however, is Nicholas Galitzine’s Elliot Matthews – a young self-professed journalist who’s ostensibly in town for a local arts festival, but who realises the dead-shepherd story could be worth much more. Suspects include a rival shepherd (Tosin Cole), a butcher (Conleth Hill), a hotelier (Hong Chau), and perhaps even George’s waspish lawyer (Emma Thompson), though the film is too busy contriving regular passages of sheepy antics to give any of these humans an especially plausible motive.
Could the perpetrator be George’s daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon), who stood to gain the most from his death? Per the whodunit rulebook, this means it obviously wasn’t her, and also that she becomes the likeliest culprit in the eyes of the bumbling local policeman, played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun (with a surprisingly passable English accent – at least someone tried).
As in the Babe films, to which The Sheep Detectives owes an obvious debt, the animal visual effects are startling. The sheep themselves are all-digital yet never less than wholly plausible, aside from the whole solving-a-murder-while-sounding-like-Julia Louis-Dreyfus-etc thing. It’s a marshmallowy all-age confection, as fluffy as its ovine protagonists, even if some aspects are likely to elicit a species-appropriate meh-eh-eh-eh-eh.
In cinemas from Friday, May 8