The Sheep Detectives: Movie Review

If you had told me before watching this that one of my favourite movies of the year, and one that would have me burst into tears and sob uncontrollably by the end, was going to be a movie called The Sheep Detectives, I would have laughed in your face.

I don't think there's a better feeling than going into a movie with absolutely no expectations and coming out the other side having discovered a hidden gem and a new favourite. This is exactly what watching The Sheep Detectives was like for me. Although this is a family movie and one whose target audience is definitely children, the themes that it explores hit on a deeper level.

In The Sheep Detectives, Hugh Jackman plays George, a shepherd whose entire life revolves around his flock of sheep. Every night before going to sleep, George reads detective novels and murder mystery stories to his sheep, pretending that they are able to understand him. Unbeknownst to George, however, his sheep can actually understand every word he tells them and follow along with his stories. When George is found dead one morning, the sheep quickly come to the conclusion that he has been murdered. With the town’s main officer, Tim Derry, being completely clueless and a bit of an idiot, the sheep realise that they cannot rely on him to solve the case. Instead, they must work together to investigate George’s death and uncover the mystery of who murdered him.

The story of this movie is entertaining in its own right. It’s a witty, quirky whodunit murder mystery where the characters we care about most aren’t human, making it easy to see why the film would draw you into its world. However, one of the best things about The Sheep Detectives is how much deeper it goes when exploring the themes within its story.

A very significant part of the story is that the sheep can make themselves forget anything they want. Whenever something bad happens, such as someone dying, they simply make themselves forget that the memory ever happened. Because of this, they don’t understand the concept of death and instead believe that when a sheep dies, they simply “turn into a cloud.” As the movie progresses and the sheep get closer and closer to discovering the truth about what happened to George, they slowly begin to realise that death is real and that they had forced themselves to believe otherwise. This creates an incredibly layered and profound theme about working through unresolved grief, which hits you like a ton of bricks, much like it does for the sheep when they finally realise the truth.

The cast is spectacular, both the live-action and voice actors. Hugh Jackman exits the story quite early, but he is still the heart and soul of it all, bringing so much life to George that we immediately warm to him and understand why his sheep care so deeply about him. There’s also a crazy array of A-listers behind the voices of the sheep, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, Regina Hall, Brett Goldstein, and more. The live-action cast is not too shabby either, with Emma Thompson, Nicholas Braun, and Nicholas Galitzine being some of the stand-outs.

If you’re looking for a movie to become your new comfort film, make you laugh, cry, ponder life, work through unresolved grief, and overall make you feel every emotion under the sun, then this is the movie for you.

"After all, life is a mystery. But if there's one answer to all the great riddles of the universe, one secret to happiness, I propose it would be simply this. Sheep. No, seriously, it really is sheep."

Love, George