Though I enjoy being cozy and am currently in the process of solving several mysteries, I have found myself curiously averse to the “cozy mystery” genre. Friends regularly effuse to me about Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books or various British TV shows that aren’t Mrs. Hatt but could be Mrs. Hatt, insisting that they are indeed great, engaging comfort in dreadful times. 

But something about the genre—or, at least, my perception of the genre—rubs me the wrong way, much like various strains of YA or romance do. I understand wanting to retreat into niceness and good cheer and all that, but I worry about the deadening effects of such things. Literary fiction struggles while bookstore shelves (and, I guess, TV streamers) are filled with easy entertainment. Perhaps something is being lost, some crucial human muscle for difficult thinking, in all this window seat tea-drinking. I realize that’s rich coming from someone who watches as much Food Network and HGTV as I do (to say nothing of my thoroughly mortifying YouTube viewing history), but cozy mystery’s particular twee sweetness and quirk or whatever vaguely troubles me, like it’s all small doses of a Quietus pill taken with increasing frequency as the world falls apart. 

Now that I’ve got you all on my side for being so fun, may I also say that while I appreciate the aesthetic achievements of the Babe films—you know, the pair of movies from a million years ago about talking farm animals going on idiosyncratic little adventures—they have never sat well with me. I find them unnerving. I don’t have a general aversion to talking beasts—I wept throughout the entirety of Christopher Robin, pretty much—but the Babe movies carry the form too far into something like the uncanny valley. My skin crawled a little when I watched them. 

It was with those two biases clouding my mind that I trudged into a screening of The Sheep Detectives, a burden I had to bear because we are covering it on an upcoming episode of the podcast I co-host, Critical Darlings. (Which is fun and important and you should all listen to it, wherever you get your podcasts.) Here were two of my little pet peeves, smooshed together: farm animals—specifically the ovines of the title—solving a cozy British mystery. Bah! 

Further heightening my dread (well, okay, at least my mild reluctance to sit in a screening room on a lovely spring afternoon) was the fact that the film is directed by Kyle Balda, who is responsible for three films involving the Minions. Mind you, I have never seen more than a few seconds of footage of the Minions in my apparently miserable and crabby life, but I just know that those yellow ghouls would not be to my liking were I to encounter them in full. And, to be fair, I have heard from discerning friends who have seen the movies with their children (or on their own; don’t worry, those ones are in prison now) that the Minions series isn’t exactly golden-age Pixar. So what kind of hellish movie was I about to see, really? 

Things began as I feared. Hugh Jackman, a cornball who is only sometimes lovable for it, plays a gruff, loner shepherd living in a trailer in a field outside a cartoonishly bucolic English hamlet. (Or, if you insist, an English hamnet.) I think we are meant to find him charming in the irascible sort of way that characters are sometimes meant to be likable, but I wasn’t buying it. The shepherd, George, talks to his sheep like they are people, he reads mystery novels to them at night, and he’s given them dopey names like Fart and Judy. (There are not actually any sheep named Fart or Judy in the movie.) It feels, at first, painfully effortful, like someone trying really hard to make something endearing but relying on way too much canned quaintness and CGI. I shifted in my seat, probably theatrically sighed, and longed for the real sunshine dwindling away to nothing outside. 

But then, really only a few minutes later, I found myself suddenly quite engaged. Why, there’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the few good children of billionaires, voicing lead sheep Lily. And that’s Chris O’Dowd as a sad, wise sidekick named Mopple (better than Fart, or Judy.) Even Patrick Stewart—so overused as a comic cameo, because isn’t it funny that such an august thespian sometimes says silly things in movies and TV—is actually funny and judiciously employed as an addled old ram named Sir Richfield. 

And the human actors are likable too, even the ones struggling their way through British accents. Nicholas Braun does an agreeable (for once) riff on Cousin Greg as the bumbling local copper. Nicholas Galitzine—in the best thing he’ll be in this year, I think we can assume—seems to be having fun playing a nerdy, ambitious reporter. Eventually Emma Thompson shows up, and you know what? I for one have not gotten sick of Emma Thompson doing Emma Thompson drag just yet. 

For its part, the computer wizardry on display is actually quite marvelous, and the actual, real-life locations the production found (set against at least some digital skies, I think) are homey and gorgeous.

So that’s all surprisingly likable. But what really works about The Sheep Detectives— which is as winsome and lovely as anything I’ve seen in a while—is its script, adapted from Leonie Swann’s novel Three Bags Full by Chernobyl screenwriter Craig Mazin. The dialogue is winsome and limber in the lighter bits, and disarmingly thoughtful when things get more serious. 

And the film does get serious. The Sheep Detectives achieves something realized far too rarely these days: it’s a family film that trusts its audience, young and old, to handle nuanced heavier stuff, to accept it right alongside the cute comedy. Given that there is a murder, death would have to be confronted in some fashion. But past that obvious necessity, the film delves—wholly unnecessarily, but admirably!—into matters of existence, as sheep learn hard truths about mortality and history and prejudice. There is a sincere wistfulness and sorrow lilting around, and intruding into, the film’s sunnier aspects. Which gives The Sheep Detectives the breadth and depth of, well, actual life. 

Which is all to say, I cried several times during the film, wholly moved by the delicate way that silliness and pathos are blended together, gracefully building toward a conclusion that has entirely earned its feel-good hopefulness. Is this what everyone meant by ‘cozy’? Or is this something else? 

What it certainly is—which is another poignant facet of the film—is a reminder of an age when studios were more confident producing something offbeat, simply because of its quality. The Sheep Detectives is a carefully but inventively tailored film that, yes, is based on IP, but not of the sort that regularly gets made into theatrically released films these days. The film’s existence is heartening, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, we might actually be on the road out of franchise land and toward a renewed investment in story, in style, in well-rounded substance. Or, this and a few other recent titles are just deceptive anomalies and we’ll soon be mired again in whatever Wall Street thinks is safest. 

One way to help the movie’s noble cause is to go see it. Which I hope you will! I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s liking, but if grumpy old me was as affected by it as I was, maybe you will be too. How about a deal: if you go see The Sheep Detectives (or, really, anything in theaters that seems fun and different) I’ll bring a Richard Osman novel (or some other snuggly suspense) with me to Cannes and will read it in my down time. I’m ready to be proven wrong. But I think I’m right about these sheep.