3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Sheep Detectives

2026, Kyle Balda (Despicable Me 3) -- Amazon

Cozy murder mysteries are our thing -- Marmy and mine, not Kent; I have probably said that before. Stealing / mis-quoting Kent's quip, which must have been used on more than half the reviews of the movie (right? right?) how can you get cozier than a wool sweater? But to be fair to the genre, it is set in the English countryside (but is it? as many people as not speak with an American accent) full of quirky characters (and sheep) and has a murder being investigated by an amateur -- you cannot get more amateur at detecting than a sheep.

Kent said coat and I said sweater -- the "cozy" is the wearing of the wool.

So, on a lovely green hillside, that could have a pie maker living nearby, lives a man named George Hardy (Hugh Jackman, The Wolverine), and his sheep. He's an irascible old coot who refuses to work with the nearby other shepherd, and has most of the people in the nearby village disliking him. Dispensing with the usual Scottish or Welsh joke, Hardy prefers sheep to people, so much so that each of his sheep are named and each night he settles them down with a reading, often from his own collection of murder mysteries. Its a good life for all involved; until he dies.

The local authorities-y think it must have been a heart attack, but it doesn't explain why one hand is painted blue, one is painted green. A small time reporter (Nicholas Galitzine, Masters of the Universe) who has come to town to do a story on the disappointing cultural festival (three booths setup by the same person) convinces the constabulary that it was murder, and soon after it is discovered George was indeed poisoned. The sheep, led by smartest ewe Lily, who would normally will themselves into forgetting anything painful, decide they have to investigate themselves -- after all, how different can a real murder be from the books George would read to them.

Its different, of course, and yet it is not, because, after all, this is actually a cozy murder mystery based on a murder-mystery German novel. But atypical because, well, not many have talking self-aware sheep.

The movie is just delightful. The sheep world building fills us in on what we need to know, but doesn't become overly expositional. There is the forgetting, there are "winter lambs" [not "winter sheep"] instead of just black sheep which is exactly what Sebastian [not Stan] is, the shunned members of their society. Death is "turning into clouds" and as expected, they are utterly terrified of the world outside the meadow they live in. Each sheep depicted is of a different breed, for reasons only George knew, and they each have widely different personalities. 

Of course, Marmy / the Peanut Gallery, figgered out who the murderer was right off the top, so the movie left us on the how's and the why's and the misdirections; and the who's. We have George's long lost daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon, The Bear), executor of George's will Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson, Dead Again), town butcher Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill, Game of Thrones), rival shepherd Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole, Supacell), quaint hotelier Beth Pennock (Hong Chau, Asteroid City) who was secretly in love with George, Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Paddington 2) and the idiot single (in both ways you're thinking) police officer Tim (Nicholas Braun, Succession) as our familiar cast of quirky locals. And in the meadow we get Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Onward), Mopple (Chris O'Dowd, Monsters vs Aliens) who remembers everything, Reggie (Brett Goldstein, The Garfield Movie) and Ronnie (Brett Goldstein, Fraggle Rock) the rams, Sir Richfield (Sir Patrick Stewart, American Dad!) who has Orf, Cloud (Regina Hall, The Spongebob Movie: Search for SquarePants), Zora (Bella Ramsey, Hilda), Wool-Eyes (Rhys Darby, Badjelly), and Sebastian (Bryan Cranston, Isle of Dogs). The motive is all tied up in the little known knowledge that George was rich from his development of a salve for the sheep ailment Orf. The how was poison from a berry which initially implicates Rebecca, but it is the green hand that reveals her innocence... by way of sheep detecting, of course.