Montrose has two spectacular railway viaducts but only one is used by trains. The pedestrian bridge over the River North Esk is at the point where the two northbound walking routes towards St Cyrus merge—the shorter one through Kinnaber Woods, and the longer one along Montrose Beach and the skittish estuary trail. After passing over the viaduct, the path banks down to sea level and soon passes a farm on the left hand side. I have seen the biggest flock of sheep in the area in this field. They are usually eating. They sound to me exactly as children mimic them; but in a bracing new movie the cast of sheep talk to each other and are not quite as daft as we interpret them to be.
Film critics often say that every story that could be told already has been told. But I’m struggling to remember anything that tells it in quite this way. The delightful adults’ movie “The Sheep Detectives” (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is hidden in the clothing of a children’s tale. It does a lot to restore my faith in the inventive possibilities of storytelling. “If there’s one step to happiness,” a shepherd says, “I’d propose it’d be simply this—sheep!” They are “the kindest creatures on earth” that give “the peace only shepherds know.” He treats them at night: “I choose a book to read out loud to them,” he says. The shepherd gets more peace than he bargained for; he is murdered a few minutes after the film’s opening.
By now we understand what the human cast doesn’t—that these sheep can talk. This allows a playful, conspiratorial, well-scripted, magical movie to unfold for the adult audience while the children run about in the space below the massive Playhouse screen. The film digs into the “black sheep” “other” while avoiding the pejorative term. “You’re not to play with that winter lamb,” a mother tells her spring-born offspring. Sheep reject winter lambs because they’re different. Meanwhile, they have ingenious ways of explaining the unknown. “All those clouds were once sheep,” one says. “Do all sheep become clouds?” a lamb asks. “Yes, Pickles, all of us. I’ll become a cloud just like my parents before me.” The film skirts the less-family-friendly truths of the lamb business. When one sheep says that the shepherd “raised us just for our wool,” another asks what other reason could there be.
The filmmakers introduce their slightly campy human murder suspects. One is a rival shepherd. “I always love the way he smells,” one of the sheep says. “It’s his woollen sweaters,” another says. The morally conflicted vicar “fancies himself a shepherd.” The gleeful butcher records the number of sheep in a reporters notebook while nodding off as he counts, and scowls at the phrase “animal-welfare charity.” The shepherd “was a vegetarian,” he says. “I can forgive that in a woman, but in a man? Disgusting.” A photojournalist zooms into town to cover the annual fair but “it’s not a festival, it’s just tables. I’m not going to get a promotion writing about this.” How about a collaboration on the investigation with the police constable instead? “I need a story, you need an arrest,” he says.
The P.C., played by Nicholas Braun, is the best of the characters. He is “just an officer who’s always detecting,” who “gave the scene a good searching,” and fancies one of the suspects while realising he really shouldn’t. “This is your first murder, isn’t it?” asks the shepherd’s lawyer. “What!” the P.C. says! “You think I killed him?” A pause, just long enough. “Oh. You mean my first murder case!” He notices that “the sheep turn up when anything interesting happens” and they lead him to the clues that allow him to say, “Gotcha!”
The sheep paid close attention to the human murder-mysteries they heard. They are our eager stand-ins. There are an abundance of smiling cross-references to the crime genre. The chief-investigating sheep is Lilly, “the sharpest sheep in the world,” whose partner has the same surname as Agatha Christie’s sleuth, Miss Marple. “I see everything,” Lilly says, pacing up and down in front of the sheep—foretelling the denouement which we hope will take place at the end, in proper Agatha Christie form. “The policeman is completely useless,” Lilly says, “like in all the night-time novels.” But luckily murder-mysteries have “very simple rules” such as “an unexpected person arrives and changes everything,” or “the victim is the most important clue.” Another character is a wise old ram, Sebastian, who is something of a sheep nomad. “Do you know what humans call stupid people who can’t think for themselves?” he asks. “Ducks?” another replies. “Sheep,” he says. Lilly says to the flock, “No eating the crime scene.” The four components—confidently-paced story, well-developed characters, sympathetic C.G.I. sheep, and hummable, string-heavy symphonic score—are edited into perhaps the strongest movie of 2026.
One morning Marple and Lilly decide to go to with Sebastian into town to hunt for clues. But they are too scared to cross the road, never having seen tarmac before. A sprightly chicken comes out of nowhere and crosses the road in front of them. It’s really funny. When they walk across the hard surface, the filmmakers add the sound of the clops. Sebastian shows them round. “This is the church where somebody called God lives,” he says. “God is both a shepherd and a lamb. They eat him on Sundays.” Sebastian was here perhaps a week ago. “I eat flowers here sometimes,” he says.
“Humans often lie and you can see it in their eyes,” Lilly says, as we watch the P.C. grill his suspects. It’s clever. It makes us watch the actors’ eyes. It’s the daughter’s turn. “The face is happy,” Lilly says, “but the eyes are scared.” The lawyer reads out the dead man’s “new will, dated three days before his death.” “Of course!” Lilly says. “There’s always a new will!”
Adam Poole
10th May 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
