- Starring
- Hugh Jackman, Brett Goldstein, Patrick Stewart
- Director
- Kyle Balda
- Rating
- PG
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Comedy, Mystery
- Release date
- May 8, 2026
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
On a quiet English farm, a kind-hearted shepherd reads murder mysteries aloud to his flock every night, never imagining they understand a single word. But when he is found dead under suspicious circumstances, the clever sheep realize it’s a real murder — and decide they must solve the case themselves. The Sheep Detectives is a woolly whodunit where the unlikeliest detectives take the lead.
The Sheep Detectives REVIEW
PARENTAL NOTES
Important Information for Parents
Our Parental Notes flag the material parents may want to know about before pressing play, including profanity, blasphemy, adult content, extreme violence, frightening intensity, hyper-stimulating sequences, and other family-content concerns.
WOKE REPORT
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
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Whole family loved it. Tears were shed. A genuinely good murder mystery, too
Honestly, this is better than it should be, and was surprisingly good. The wokeness is mostly hidden. As mentioned in the review, there are a lot of people on the small English Village that don’t look at all English. They make kind of a point of preaching that vegetarianism is good, eating meat is bad, and meat farmers and butchers are really bad (which sort of fits into the whole sheep movie theme). There is some preachiness at the end. It was reasonably funny, and kept me guessing the whodunit until the end. Except for the slight preachiness at the end, I enjoyed it. I didn’t get bored. I gave it an A-.
not bad. its cute & has a good message but of course they couldn’t help with the woke stuff. its supposed to take place in some english country shire & it looks like the lobby of the dang UN. then again, maybe england does look like that now w/ the “new british”. come on rupert! but besides that, its got a wholesome message & does well to play within the genre of the whodunit.
The trailers I watched leading up to this movie excited me, but I still wasn’t sure going into this thing if it was going to be worth an $11 movie ticket, $5 bag of Skittles, and $5 soft drink. Thankfully, it was the best movie I’ve seen since 2024.
If you’ve watched any of the trailers or read the synopsis, you know The Sheep Detectives tells the story of about twenty woolly sheep that reside in a meadow vaguely located somewhere in the UK, cared for by a kindly shepherd (Hugh Jackman). That is, until one stormy night, when they find their caretaker lying on the ground outside of his trailer, dead as can be.
Personal loyalty and an inept policeman force the smartest sheep in the flock, Lily, to take matters into her own slightly naive hooves and solve the mystery with the help of kindly Mopple and loner Sebastian, her two four-legged friends. Together, they must figure out whodunit.
The good points about this movie, which I’ll hit briefly, are many and meaningful. The atmosphere and build-up of the narrative are very well executed. The audience is given plenty of time to get to know Hugh Jackman’s character George Hardy. Why should we care if someone has it out for him? Trust me, by the time he kicks the bucket, you will sympathize with his grief-stricken flock.
The mystery is presented as a truly tangled skein of lies, leaving us with plenty of unusual suspects. And the themes deal with weighty subjects, such as death, innocent until proven guilty, and trust. I was not expecting this movie to prove complex for adults as well as children.
Lastly, the woke report. Absolutely nothing. The human cast is comprised of mostly white male leads, with a more diverse supporting cast. No girl-bosses, no gays, and no subliminal propaganda.
My only complaint with this amazing piece of film is that God is mentioned (from a sheep’s perspective) as being a Shepherd (good), a Lamb (yup), and a cookie (which would seriously make me question my religion if I believed that). “And He damns things,” Sebastian the sheep says with perfect gravity. However, this brief exchange contains the only profanity in the entire movie. For a family-oriented murder mystery, that’s actually a step forward.
Ultimately, I will be getting this movie on home video once it is released. An amazing story that feels like an Agatha Christie movie, albeit with a cuter cast.