‘The Sheep Detectives’ Is the Family Film You Didn’t See Coming

Nobody walked into The Sheep Detectives expecting to sob. And yet, here we are.

The new family mystery — which opened in theaters May 8 — follows a flock of unusually clever sheep who, after their beloved shepherd is found dead, decide to solve the murder themselves. On paper, it sounds like a charming novelty. In practice, critics and audiences are emerging from screenings genuinely teary-eyed, buzzing about one of the most disarmingly emotional family films in years. “Talking sheep solving a murder mystery and making me cry in the process was not on my 2026 bingo card,” wrote one reviewer. She was not alone.

Hugh Jackman plays George Hardy, a reclusive shepherd in the fictional English village of Denbrook who raises his flock purely for wool and treats every animal like family. His favorite nighttime ritual: reading murder mystery novels aloud to the sheep, not knowing — or perhaps not caring — whether they understand him. As it turns out, they understand every word. When George turns up dead one morning, poisoned by an unknown suspect, his flock realizes the bumbling local constable (Nicholas Braun, in what multiple critics are calling his best post-Succession role) isn’t going to crack the case. So they take matters into their own hooves.

Lily, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, leads the charge. She’s the sharpest sheep in the flock — George’s favorite, the one who always solved the mystery before he finished reading. Alongside her are Mopple (Chris O’Dowd), a Merino sheep with the unusual affliction of remembering everything, and Sebastian (Bryan Cranston), a brooding ram with a complicated backstory who was adopted into the flock by George after a hard life. Sir Ritchfield (Patrick Stewart), a pompous elder statesman of the flock, rounds out the inner circle, along with the extra-shaggy Wool-Eyes (Rhys Darby), pampered Cloud (Regina Hall), and a pair of battering-ram brothers, Reggie and Ronnie, both voiced by Brett Goldstein — a sly nod to the Kray twins that adults in the audience will clock immediately.

And then there’s the Winter Lamb.

Voiced by Tommy Birchall, the tiny misfit lamb — shunned by the flock for being born in the wrong season — is the film’s secret emotional weapon. Reviewers keep bringing him up unprompted. One called him “so cute I could cry just thinking about it.” He is, in many ways, the heart of the whole thing.

“Babe Meets Knives Out” — and That’s Actually Accurate

The film is adapted from Leonie Swann’s 2005 novel Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story, a German bestseller that spent three and a half years on German charts and has been translated into 30 languages. Swann — who writes under a pseudonym and has never publicly disclosed her real name — was a doctoral student studying “the animal point of view in fiction” when she started writing what she thought was a short story. It became a novel. She never finished the dissertation.

The screenplay was written by Craig Mazin, the Emmy-winning creator of Chernobyl and The Last of Us — which, yes, is a jarring creative pivot. Mazin toned down the novel’s darker adult elements (the book includes drugs and suicide), changed the ending, and — in one of the more charming production details — consulted a book by Fred Rogers about how to talk to children about death while adapting the script for younger audiences. To help write about grief, he turned to Mister Rogers. That tells you something about the movie’s DNA.

Jackman himself described the pitch as “Babe meets Knives Out” — and having seen it, critics largely agree that’s not just marketing spin. “I would’ve played any character,” Jackman joked during press. “I would’ve played one of the sheep.”

For Louis-Dreyfus, the script was the thing. “When I first heard about it, I was like, ‘Come on, what?’” she admitted. “And then I read the script, and I completely fell in love and knew this was a project I had to be a part of just based on the material itself.” It’s not her first time voicing an animal — she’s played an ant in A Bug’s Life and a horse in Animal Farm — but Lily is something different: a sheep with a genuinely human emotional arc, learning what it costs to be a leader when you’re also questioning your own certainty.

O’Dowd, for his part, was thrilled by the upgrade. “I’ve played a cockroach before and a slug,” he said. “I feel like I really came up in the world… I’m a mammal now, baby.”

The Part Nobody Expected: The Crying

The film’s emotional core turns on memory — specifically, the flock’s ability to collectively will themselves to forget anything unpleasant. They’ve convinced themselves, for instance, that sheep don’t die; they turn into clouds. It’s a comforting fiction they maintain together. Only Mopple can’t do it. He remembers everything, and he’s been carrying it alone.

“My character, Mopple the sheep, is really the only one who remembers things, and that resonated with me,” O’Dowd said. “Not because I have a particularly great memory, but because we all curate our own lives in a way. We carry certain memories with us because we want to, and sometimes we hold onto things we’d probably rather forget. I think that’s a fascinating thing to explore.”

O’Dowd went to a screening with his own kids. “I was crying at the end of it,” he said. “It’s nice to be part of something that’s powerful enough to move you like that.”

Braun, whose Officer Tim grows from a hopelessly inept constable into something resembling a take-charge hero, had his own emotional reckoning with the film. Asked whether he’d erase bad memories from his own life if he could, he thought about it. “At the end of the day, it would make me a different guy. And so I just, I have to include it. I think that’s just part of being a person.”

Molly Gordon, who plays Rebecca — George’s previously unknown American daughter, who conveniently arrives in Denbrook the day of his death and stands to inherit a small fortune from a sheep medicine patent — put it most succinctly: “This movie has no right to make us cry in the way that it did.”

And Jackman connected personally to the film’s Winter Lamb storyline, admitting there were moments in his own childhood where he felt isolated despite growing up in a large family.

The Cast, the Suspects, and Emma Thompson

The human side of the mystery gives the sheep plenty to work with. Braun’s Officer Tim is the bumbling local constable who, to his credit, slowly notices that the neighborhood sheep might actually be helping him solve the case — and grows into it. Nicholas Galitzine plays Elliot, an ambitious young reporter who wandered into Denbrook to cover a “cultural festival” that barely existed and pivots, opportunistically, to the murder. Hong Chau is the local innkeeper with a mysterious past connection to George. Conleth Hill plays the local butcher, named Ham, who George despised. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is the town vicar, who was quietly accepting large cash payments from the deceased. Tosin Cole plays a neighboring shepherd with his own motive.

And then Emma Thompson arrives as Lydia Harbottle, George’s lawyer, stepping out of a black chauffeured limo to preside over the reading of the will — during which George’s own words drop a bombshell on everyone assembled. “Has any actor ever conveyed the sheer joy of acting with more brio?” wrote one critic. Gordon described Thompson with something close to reverence: “Emma Thompson is the most inspiring soul — so curious, giving, political, kind. If she were the queen or the president, the world would be in a very different place.”

The film’s single funniest gag, critics seem to agree, arrives before the opening credits even roll: the roaring MGM lion is replaced by a sheep’s baa. It’s a perfect one-second joke that sets the tone for everything that follows.

What the Critics Are Saying

The film currently holds a 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety’s Guy Lodge writing that “there’s wisdom amid the silliness, as the story gently makes a case for the necessity of grief, mindfulness and mortal awareness… That’s more than you might expect from a film called The Sheep Detectives.” AV Club’s Tim Grierson praised it for “evoking the sunny spirit of classics like Babe while teaching important lessons about death and community.”

Not every critic is fully on board. The AP’s review called it “too gentle and strenuously poignant to turn its silly tale into all that much fun,” and the Wall Street Journal suggested it might play better on a couch than in a multiplex. A couple of critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rotten score, with one writing that “the combination of its stale execution and over-reliance on its woolly stars causes the film to stumble out of the barn.”

The more common response, though, is something closer to genuine surprise. The animation is photorealistic — the sheep are fully CGI, a technical achievement the filmmakers were meticulous about. Director Kyle Balda (making his live-action debut after helming three films in the Despicable Me and Minions universe) drove out to a sheep farm near his Oregon home the day he finished reading the script. “Very instantly I could see the behavior of the sheep, their different personalities,” he said. “I learned very quickly that there are more varieties of sheep than dogs.” The goal throughout was that the sheep in this world are sheep — not humans in disguise. They don’t drive cars. They’re afraid to cross the road. When they speak, humans hear only bleating.

There’s also a quietly pointed undercurrent to the whole mystery. The villain’s scheme involves the industrial consolidation of the farm — something small and local swallowed by something large and indifferent. O’Dowd noted the resonance: “In this time of mergers and this type of mass unemployment ahead of us, it’s important to remember to keep your food local if you can.” Louis-Dreyfus agreed: “Beware the commercialization of anything — and question it.” The film wears it lightly enough that you might miss it entirely. But it’s there.

Braun, for his part, predicted the film will shift how people think about sheep the way Toy Story made audiences look at their kids’ toys differently. “I don’t think people are going to be eating as much lamb after this,” he said.

The Sheep Detectives is rated PG and runs 109 minutes. It’s in theaters now.