Sheep In The Box Is An A.I. Reckoning In Search Of An Ending
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest is a meandering sci-fi film on digital resurrection.
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a number of directors have openly embraced generative A.I. Japanese humanist Hirokazu Koreeda (the director of Shoplifters, The Third Murder and Monster) is not among them — at least, not yet. However, his removed optimism on the technology’s future results in a strange mixed bag in his latest film, the grief-tinged Palme d’Or hopeful Sheep in the Box, which follows a couple in mourning who replace their dead son with an android copy.
Sci-fi films have long used mechanical beings to reflect our anxieties (as far back as the 1890s), but cyberpunk landmarks like Blade Runner were especially pivotal in how they utilized robot intelligence. The question of what makes us human has been beamed back to us through umpteen stories of what doesn’t — or what makes non-humans most human-like, in a world where humanity itself is conditional. However, in 2026, at a time when generative A.I. mimics consciousness and interaction on unprecedented scales (see also: Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader being dumped by his A.I. girlfriend), there exists a need for stories about artificial intelligence to evolve.
The future presaged in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Spike Jonze’s Her is already here — if not in a literal sense, then most certainly in an emotional one, where technology is being pushed to fill the emotional crevices caused by grief and loneliness. This is where Sheep in the Box finds itself, in a “not so distant future” where ghoulish targeted advertising, sent via mail by tech startup Rebirth, reminds Otone (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) that their dead son Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) can be digitally re-animated. However, unlike the aforementioned landmarks, there’s little debate at first about whether a promotional robotic copy of Kakeru, constructed from photos and other digital data, is a real person. For much of the film, he’s a tool with a personality — directed, the way his incredible young actor is, to behave with a fluid naturalism. The reluctant Kensuke even likens him to a Roomba, or a Tamagotchi. His wife Otone, on the other hand, is nonetheless taken by Kakeru, which gradually exposes the festering schism between the unhappy couple.
As things stand at the film’s beginning, Kensuke and Otone have been dealing with (or rather, refusing to deal with) their son’s mysterious, possibly-accidental demise in different ways. That Koreeda’s camera often looks past Kakeru — who would, in decades past, have been the movie's most fascinating and novel aspect — and towards the adult humans, makes Sheep in the Box incredibly timely. That people gravitate towards imitations of humanity is less dramatically interesting than their reasons why; even contemporary reports of vulnerable users being sucked in by A.I. chatbots are underscored by a certain melancholy. Something is missing in each of these subjects, and this digital refuge is their only escape.
For Otone, who denies her grief, and Kensuke, who bargains with its root causes (he’s constantly trying find a concrete culprit for Kakeru’s demise), this marital fissure lies at the root of their other, minor disagreements, like how to spend their time with their new robo-son, or with each other. Here, Koreeda lays the foundation for riveting drama that gets to the heart of why the world of generative A.I. and LLMs is heading in this direction. However, he soon cuts the movie’s legs out from under it, by swerving in a much more conventional direction, transforming it into a familiar but ultimately directionless digital-consciousness drama.
Sheep in the Box begins intriguingly, but takes a turn that does its story of grief a disservice.
The film has an intriguing look about it, with modernist designs and washed out greys and blues hinting at a tactile world that has lost some of its vigor. However, its focus on this misplaced vibrancy, by way of a couple turning to technology to fill a child-shaped void, ends up slipping away rather quickly, as Kensuke becomes relegated to a minor character, and the story begins to shift towards Otone’s family in unwieldy ways. Before long, Sheep in the Box can no longer be reasonably called a film about mortality, a switch that flips when Otone begins observing changes in Kakeru’s behavior. These aren’t particularly drastic, but they begin hinting at the well-worn idea that this programmed human Xerox copy may have consciousness, or a soul, concepts which have been explored with more dramatic rigor in practically every film or short story that has approached the subject before.
Here, Koreeda’s ideas manifest in far too vague a fashion, with the possibility of individual self-actualization and even a digital exodus hovering over the plot, but only lightly. Otone and Kensuke don’t seem attached enough to Kakeru (and to put it crudely: damaged enough by grief) for these possibilities to matter all that much to them. Rather than fully exploring the negative space between its adult couple, or conversely, the manner in which a humanoid consciousness can temporarily fill it, Sheep in the Box ends up in a lukewarm middle ground between the two approaches, and thus, ends up on a torturously winding quest for an actual conclusion.
With one ending after another, the movie tosses out thematic exposition as if grasping at stars, in order to retroactively determine what it was all about in the first place. For a filmmaker as otherwise deft and dramatically surefooted as Koreeda, it plays bizarrely like a work of severe self-doubt, as though he was never quite certain of his feelings about evolving technology. But rather than unpacking these contradictions, he put so much effort towards finding some semblance of a didactic, essayistic answer that he forgot to maintain his signature focus on complex humanity. In a film ostensibly about how A.I. impacts the human condition, there’s no more morose an irony.
