I finally got around to watching The Sheep Detectives.

I loved it.

The movie has a fairly long genesis. 

A woman by the name of Leonie Swann wrote a mystery entitled Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi that was published in Germany in 2005. It became an international best seller and is better known in English speaking lands as Three Bags Full.

It’s a fairly standard whodunit but with a twist: the detectives that solve the murder mystery are a flock of sheep.

Hey, they’re highly motivated! The victim after all is their beloved shepherd.

Shortly after its 2006 English publication, Craig Mazin (of the Scriptnotes podcast and who eventually went on to write the Chernobyl miniseries for HBO) wrote a screenplay based on many of the same characters as the novel but with his own plot and then went about obtaining the rights to Ms. Swann’s book.

There were delays and initially the movie was planned as an animated feature, but that fell through, and eventually it was produced as a live action feature starring Hugh Jackman as the shepherd, Emma Thompson as his solicitor, and Nicholas Braun using a faux English accent as the idiot policeman.

The sheep were all portrayed by little people in extremely realistic sheep costumes. Or perhaps they were computer generated. Whatever.

I haven’t read the book (though I intend to, it’s on my long list), but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

George, the shepherd, is more comfortable with his flock of sheep than he is with his fellow humans, he even has given each of them names. Every evening he reads to them from one of his favorite books, usually a detective story, so the sheep are well versed in all the ins and outs of how to solve a murder when they are confronted by the mysterious death of George, and the local authorities initially don’t seem to be taking it very seriously.

But it’s not merely a detective story. The sheep have their own society and the rules that they live by. When something unpleasant happens, they agree to collectively forget that it ever occurred. They have their own mythology as to what happens when they—well sheep don’t die. They simply become clouds. Or so they believe.

And that’s as much as I’m going to reveal.

Suffice it to say that there is plenty of humor and philosophy, over and above the crackling good whodunit, so I expect to find myself viewing it again and again.

For a longer review, check out The Moya View’s take.

If you watch the movie—and I heartily recommend that you do—then I expect you’ll have no problem figuring out which is my favorite scene in the movie. Let me hear from you when you do!

It’s currently on Amazon Prime, although a DVD/Blu-ray release is promised.

 

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