Reasons To Watch 'The Sheep Detectives,' Ranked

I saw the sheep movie. It was great. You should see it, too. Here are 10 reasons why, ranked, by me, only one of which involves me crying in the movie theater.

Off we go.

TEN: The plot of this movie is “a shepherd gets killed and his sheep try to solve the murder,” which sounds… it sounds kind of cheesy, right? Like, there’s a version of this movie that is cookie-cutter slop with the sheep performing a rap song in the middle. That’s not what is happening here. This sucker is way, way better than it has any right to be. It is charming as hell, first of all, but it is also littered with twists and little reveals that caught me — a cynical blogger — by surprise. I wish I could remember who said it first, but I saw this movie described as “like Knives Out crossed with Babe,” and honestly, yeah, fair. 

NINE: The sheep can talk, obviously, which I mention for two reasons:

• The voice cast is loaded, buddy. We’ve got Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the smart sheep and Bryan Cranston as the cranky sheep and Patrick Stewart as the wise sheep and Brett Goldstein as a pair of doofus rams who love to clobber things. There are more. Regina Hall, Bella Ramsey, Chris O’Dowd. Just a great job of pulling the right group of people together for the right project. 
• Do NOT think about the logistics of the sheep voices too much. If you do, you might almost miss something important while your mind is working out the beats of “so the sheep can talk to each other in English, and they can understand the humans who speak English, but they can’t communicate with the humans in English, and also some of them have American accents even though they were born and raised in England?”

Learned that one the hard way. 

EIGHT: The human cast is strong, too, starting with Hugh Jackman as the shepherd who gets murdered. Just about every other person we meet in the movie — Molly Gordon, Emma Thompson, Hong Chau — is a suspect with a reasonable enough motive, except for Nicholas Braun, who plays the lone police officer in the small town. We’ll come back to him. 

SEVEN: It is wild that this sweet little British murder mystery that features talking sheep was written by Craig Mazin. What a freaking wild resume that guy has. Google him sometime. The man wrote the Hangover movies and a handful of Scary Movie sequels, but then he also served as showrunner on Chernobyl and The Last of Us, and now he’s doing this. I genuinely do not know where one goes from there. Does… does he direct a Fast & Furious movie? It’s fascinating to me. 

SIX: There’s some real emotional depth here. Like, it gets dark in places, the same way older Disney movies got dark. There’s a real discussion of abandonment and what it means to belong. One of the sheep has a heartbreaking backstory. The shepherd isn’t the only character that dies. Be ready to confront some shit, buddy. 

FIVE: It’s also very cute and funny. There’s a part where one of the sheep is explaining God to the others and says something like “Well, he’s a shepherd... but he’s also a lamb... and he’s made of bread... and they eat him every week” and I, as a person who spent many Sunday mornings in Sunday school, chuckled a lot in the theater. 

FOUR: Oh hey, one other thing to not think about while you're not thinking about the sheep voices. Hugh Jackman's character is absolutely shredded in this movie, very clearly, which you can see even though his torso is covered by his shepherding clothes. How? How does a man who lives in a small trailer on a sheep farm and does not appear to have access to training equipment get just yoked out of his mind like… well, like Hugh Jackman? I said don’t think about it!

THREE: After having no opinion about winter lambs for my entire life, I would now happily die for any one of them, and you will too after seeing the movie. 

TWO: Okay, Nicholas Braun. You probably know him as Cousin Greg from Succession. He plays a bumbling cop who means well and can’t do anything right without the help of the sheep. He’s basically playing If Cousin Greg Were A Small-Town British Cop, which is not something I knew I wanted until I saw it start happening. It's awesome. He’s so good at doing this one exact thing that I would kind of be okay if we all agreed to typecast him as this character for the rest of his life. I feel bad saying that because he might be itching to branch out and try new roles, but… look, Kyle Schwarber hits .220 with 50 home runs a year and no one is asking him to change, you know? Find something you’re good at and do it the best you can. There’s job security in that. 

ONE: I have been telling people I cried in the sheep movie and they’ve been looking at me weird, so I need you to watch it and have your heartstrings yoinked on, too, just so I don’t look crazy. Do it for me. And for you. It’s nice to cry in a theater a little. 

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STUFF I CLICKED ON

— the damn New Yorker wrote about the Fast & Furious franchise, which is getting either one or four TV shows now, depending on whether you believe Peacock or Vin Diesel

— good blog about NBA commissioner Adam Silver trying to deal with like 12 fiascos at the same time

— really cool interactive thing about how the human body works

— hey, do you wanna see a 20-year-old Keanu do a segment for Canadian television about a teddy bear convention?

— Letterman will be on Colbert this week 

— missing Oscar 

— oh hey, some shows for Brian

— I’m still kinda flabbergasted they’re remaking Baywatch, although I really shouldn’t be

— White Lotus updates 

— unproduced Larry David screenplay uncovered 43 years later

— huge ruby discovered

— “Dolphins ‘deliberately get high’ on puffer fish nerve toxins by carefully chewing and passing them around”

—  “German tourist wins payout after losing sun lounger race”

— if you, like me, loved the video of the guy at the town meeting asking the board if they were being “pricks” over their dumb housing rules, I really do recommend watching this local news segment on him, too.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Please share and subscribe and watch the sheep movie.