After their beloved shepherd is murdered, a flock of sheep aim to help a bumbling human policeman solve the crime. Death and grief are in the well-crafted mystery mix. But the movie is sweet and funny, and it encourages viewers to repair family relationships and embrace the outcasts in their orbit.
George loves his sheep. And they love him back.
In fact, though his flock wouldn’t be considered deep conversationalists in a human sense, they give George a sweet kind of inner peace that humans can’t. Taking care of those sheep, tending to their illnesses, clipping their wool: It’s all a simple routine that calms George and brings him joy. And when he begins to feel troubled, it’s London to a brick that his favorite, Lily, will wander by and listen to him as he vents and pets her head.
Lately, George has even taken to reading out loud to the flock before he heads into his trailer for the night. They all sit there, spread out in front of him in the fading daylight, and listen intently as he reads some new mystery novel—voicing the roles and building the literary tensions. And he can almost swear they understand every word. It never fails to put a smile on his face as he finds a decent spot to end the story for the evening before wishing them all a good night. And most will even bah back in response. Ha.
Life is good.
What George doesn’t know, of course, is that his sheep do understand his every word. They love the mysteries and the way their shepherd reads them. And after he turns in, they chatter on, trying to solve whatever whodunit George has laid out for them. Lily is usually the first to figure things out, so the rams and ewes bounce their opinions off her.
“It’s the maid,” one sheep will say. “It’s the maid and maybe the butler.”
“No, it’s the widowed daughter this time,” another might opine. “She has her eye on that handsome neighbor.”
And then Lily will point out that the maid and the daughter both have ironclad alibis. She’ll run through the story’s details and then reason out who must be at fault and why. The flock will then baa and bleat about the possibilities, one way or another. Of course, when George delivers the solution the next evening, Lily is usually right.
No matter what, though, they all agree that George makes a sheep’s existence good. He gives them lives that are thoughtful and adventurous. They may be simple creatures, but they truly love George for that.
Then, something terrible happens.
One morning, after a bad storm, they find George sprawled out on the ground in front of his trailer. Is he sleeping? Why would he sleep on the wet ground? But he isn’t moving. What does this mean?
Of course, it’s Lily who recognizes exactly what this means. And when the local police show up to examine the scene, she also sees exactly what Officer Tim Derry is missing. She sees the two unfinished glasses of drink on George’s trailer table. She notes the chair that was clearly turned sideways in some sort of struggle. She sees that George came out in the storm with no coat or hat.
This was murder! Their beloved George was murdered by some human fiend. And the police are stumbling past the clues. Officer Derry says that it was probably a heart attack. And Lily almost baaas herself horse when he says that. Is he a dolt? Can’t any of them see?
That evening, Lily gathers the flock and explains what clues she’s observed. They listen, aghast at the news. What can they do? How can they possibly help poor George now?
“I know precisely what we’ll do,” Lily declares as she raises herself up to her full 3 feet 2 inches of height and glares at each sheep in the flock, eyes ablaze.
“We will solve this crime ourselves!”
George has made some mistakes in his past, and we see him trying to repair his relationship with his daughter, Rebecca. He reads out letters that attempt to give her a sense of his current life and the positive changes that life has given him. We learn that George deeply loved his wife. George can flare up in anger (more in the next section), but for the most part, we see him as a kind caretaker who is trying to be a better man.
Some of the sheep are wrestling with changes, too. The flock has a hard and fast rule that says that lambs born in the spring are good, but winter lambs are to be rejected. (And we see them spurn a small, defenseless lamb because of it.) But Lily becomes friends with a ram who was once a winter lamb himself. He sacrifices himself to protect others, and Lily comes to grip with the terrible prejudice that the flock has foolishly maintained. She embraces a young outcast and welcomes him in as family—and as part of their flock.
In flashbacks, we see George go out of his way to rescue an abandoned and abused sheep.
[This section contains spoilers.]
Some of this movie’s messages—espousing repentance, forgiveness and the need to reach out to the ostracized—could easily be seen through a lens of faith.
However, George obviously has no love for the church. And his slowly revealed backstory doesn’t always cast the church in a good light. In flashback, we see him storm into a church service and angrily slam down money that he growlingly declares is payment for a debt.
We find out that the church had put George’s small children up for adoption when his wife died because he had fallen into debt. And then, because of strict church rules, it refused to help him reconnect with his kids until he bribed the pastor with a large amount of money. Later, that pastor regrets his decision to accept the money—admitting that he was a “bad shepherd.” He sets the cash aside to benefit those in similar family situations.
The flock maintains a belief that when sheep die, they are instantly raised up into the sky as fluffy, white clouds. Lily believes that’s exactly what happened to her parents when they passed. In fact, the sheep have a practice of collectively choosing to forget anything that contradicts the things they believe or upsets their happy perspectives.
However, there’s one sheep, Mopple, who can’t forget the things he sees. And though he kindly keeps the truth to himself—so as not to upset Lily and the others—he eventually has to tell them the truth: The dead do not become perfect, white clouds. They simply die. But Mopple also proclaims that it’s “our memory that keeps the ones we love alive.”
The flock’s loner ram, Sebastian, has traveled and seen many things. And he tries to explain what he knows about human religion to the flock. He says that humans call God a shepherd—but at the same time, He’s also called a lamb. And oddly, He becomes bread on Sundays. It’s all too confusing for the sheep to grasp.
The local hotel manager, Beth, steals one of George’s letters from the town’s postwoman and becomes jealously angry when she reads it. Beth and George dated at one point, and she mistakenly believes Rebecca is George’s lover.
When Officer Derry first meets Rebecca, he is obviously very attracted to her. And in the midst of his fumbling questioning of people gathered for George’s will-reading, he asks if she has a boyfriend.
[This section contains spoilers.]
Two different individuals die in this film. We watch as a poisoned George staggers and falls out of his trailer in the middle of the night. He struggles and then succumbs to the poison on the ground. His body gets discovered the next morning.
Sebastian says he was once part of a carnival before George rescued him. In flashback, we see the ram get abused and thrown into a ring where he fights against attacking dogs. Old scars from those battles crisscross his head. In the present, Lily and Mopple get chased by guard dogs, and Sebastian jumps in to defend them. The dogs leap on him and sink their teeth into his body. He slams into the hounds and scares them away, but then he tumbles forward and dies from his wounds. (The night battle is visceral but not bloody.)
(In both of the above cases, Lily lays her head down next to the fallen in a tender farewell of appreciation and love.)
A man drives his car into a tree during a heavy rainstorm. Lily discovers that a pair of local men are slaughtering sheep for a newly proposed meatpacking business. And another shepherd wants to add George’s flock to that meaty collective. Lily then dreams of George talking to her like he used to, encouraging her to stop some men from hurting his flock.
A pair of rams—Ronnie and Ritchie—love nothing more that to bash into anything that catches their eye. They bash trees, trucks and each other. As a leader of the flock, Lily regularly keeps them in check: “We don’t bash things unless there’s a legitimate cause for bashing.” In one case, with Lily’s permission, the pair literally demolish a car.
We hear a single use each of “gosh” and “crap.”
A bottle of booze and two unfinished glasses of alcohol sit on a small table in George’s trailer. We also see a small group of people drinking glasses of wine.
Sebastian pushes back against some of the flocks’ beliefs and choices. “Do you know what humans call stupid people who can’t think for themselves? Sheep!” he declares.
This is a murder mystery, so the film establishes a string of people who either had an angry connection with George or who could simply profit from his demise. In that light, several of these people lie to keep from being seen as potentially guilty. And one person lies, deceives and attempts to set someone else up for the murder.
For most families, one of their first questions about The Sheep Detectives will be: Is this is a good pic for my kids? And the answer is yes … and sorta. It really comes down to how sensitive your particular lambs are.
Death and grief are an unexpectedly large part of this pasture-nibbling tale. It’s all handled gently. And the film can be used as a means to talk to kids about the pain of losing someone we love. But still, some children may find the live-action, in-movie losses difficult to handle—even in a film full of goofy humor and mystery-solving, talking sheep.
That said, The Sheep Detectives is, without question, a lovely and well-crafted whodunit that many families will certify as a warm and wooly treat. It delivers encouraging messages about repairing past family wounds and embracing and loving those around you—even the outcasts. This is a movie that’s funny and sweet, slapstick and tender, and a whole lot better than spending your evening scrolling through EweTube.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
