Black Sheep (2006)

Black Sheep arrives from New Zealand in 2006 with a premise that any reasonable person would call unfilmable: a genetic experiment turns the nation's most placid livestock into carnivorous, infectious predators. Jonathan King directs it without a wink. The result is a film that understands something the genre often forgets, which is that absurdity lands hardest when nobody on screen acknowledges it. Weta Workshop supplies the viscera. The hills are green. The sheep are not. It premiered at Toronto's Midnight Madness, which tells you the intended audience and the intended hour.

For those of us who catalogue progressive sensibilities, the pickings here are thin, and I record that without complaint. Danielle Mason's environmentalist, Experience, infiltrates the laboratory and drives much of the action, though the screenplay never pauses to argue anything about gender. Her activism is a plot mechanism, a convenient way to get a stranger inside the building. Angus peddles his engineered flock to a room of international businesspersons who are promptly devoured, a glancing anti-corporate gesture and nothing more. The climax detonates the flock with captured methane, which smells faintly of an ecological point until you notice it is also a fart joke. Race, queerness, body image, neurodivergence: absent. Henry's ovine phobia is childhood trauma played for comedy, not a case study in anything.

Craft carries the remainder. The film is brisk, gruesome, and genuinely funny, and its refusal to sermonize reads now as a period artifact. No lesson is delivered. No audience is scolded. The final image, a sheep dog bleating like its charges, suggests the filmmakers cared about one subject, and that subject was sheep. I respect the discipline.