I’m not quite sure how to conceptualise the pipeline between the harrowing 2019 mini-series Chernobyl and The Sheep Detectives, but here we are: writer Craig Mazin – who not only created Chernobyl but its bleak spiritual companion, the post-apocalyptic The Last of Us – has adapted for screen Leonie Swann’s German bestseller Three Bags Full, in which a flock of sheep solve their shepherd’s murder.
Mazin, it should be pointed out, first got his start in the Scary Movie and Hangover franchises, and is here paired with Minions director Kyle Balda. Yet the Mazin who coaxed sombre performances out of Pedro Pascal and Jared Harris ends up at the wheel far more than you’d expect for a film, well, about detectives who are sheep. There’s an entire meditation on the nature of morality and memory being bleated out by CGI creatures who, though rendered with loving detail, clearly never make physical contact with any person or object around them.
