Kyle Balda directs it like he accidentally wandered into a forgotten Čučić adaptation and never quite found his way back. Hugh Jackman plays George Hardy, a shepherd who reads murder mysteries to his flock every night, unaware they actually understand him. When he turns up dead in a field, poisoned and oddly serene, the sheep begin assembling the case themselves, filtering human depravity through the logic of paperback whodunits and barnyard superstition.

The premise sounds unbearable. Somehow it isn’t.

There’s an unnerving confidence to the thing. Muddy lanes. Wet wool. A village that feels less “real” than collectively remembered. At moments it brushes against late Švankmajer, or those brittle eastern bloc morality plays that used to surface at Vienna retrospectives before disappearing forever. One shot of sheep staring through fog carries more psychic weight than entire seasons of prestige television.

Craig Mazin’s script keeps threatening to become sentimental and then recoils from it at the last second. The sheep discuss death with the flat practical terror of peasants in a 1968 black-and-white Hungarian film. Patrick Stewart voices one ram like a retired provincial judge who knows the republic is collapsing. Julia Louis-Dreyfus gives the flock’s lead sheep a strange exhausted intelligence.

Not everything lands. The film occasionally mistakes silence for depth and a few of the symbolic touches feel imported from another, more self-important movie. But Balda understands something most family films don’t. Children can handle melancholy. Adults can handle absurdity. Put them together and you sometimes get something oddly haunting.

Still, the mood lingers. You leave the theater feeling vaguely cold and existentially damp. That counts for something.

Three Sheep out 4 imho

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(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5865310&forum_id=2...id#49876638)