‘Sheep in the Box’ Review: Kore-eda’s Sweet but Limp Sci-Fi Fable About a 7-Year-Old AI Humanoid

The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is not a filmmaker anyone would accuse of being Hollywood-adjacent. But his new movie, “Sheep in the Box,” takes off from an idea that sounds like pure high-concept Hollywood — or, in fact, several versions of that movie at once, all of them bad. It’s the story of an architect, Otone (played by the weirdly Sandra Dee-like Haruka Ayase), and her runty carpenter husband, Kensuke (Daigo), whose 7-year-old mop-haired son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), died two years ago in an accident. They’ve been suffering ever since, but then they’re approached by a company called REbirth that specializes in building generative AI humanoid replicas of lost loved ones. Before long, the couple welcomes into its home a replicant version of Kakeru, who looks and talks just like him. Problem solved! Or, in fact, problems just starting.

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You can instantly envision a blockbuster American version of this story. And though “Sheep in the Box” is a sweetly wan sci-fi parable that mostly just sits there, I could see a smart producer ripping off the concept anyway. Here are a few of the ways it might go: The new robot kid is so winsome and appealing that he’s like a “perfect” version of the boy they lost — which pleases the couple greatly, until they realize that no, he really isn’t their son, and no one ever could be. Or…the robot kid possesses a remarkable intelligence that comes off as a bit sinister, and from the start he seems to be missing a certain emotional je ne sais quoi. Or…it could all veer off into a strange subplot about an older boy who gather local youngsters into a woodland “Children of the Damned” cult, which the robot Kakeru ultimately joins.

At different points, “Sheep in the Box” is all those movies (and maybe a few more). Yet Kore-eda’s attitude toward what he’s showing us is so lackluster and noncommittal that it’s hard to know how to react to any of it. I’ve never been a big fan of this director, but his previous movie, “Monster,” which also premiered at Cannes (“Sheep in the Box” is his eighth feature to do so), was a time-bending saga of childhood friendship and trauma in which every scene cut sharply. “Sheep in the Box,” by contrast, feels gauzy and thrown together. For all the fantasy simplicity of the premise, there’s almost no structure to it, and though the humanoid Kakeru increases in agency and brains as the movie goes on, it still never figures out who he is. In the best AI and android movies, from “2001: A Space Odyssey” to
“Blade Runner” to Kokonada’s “After Yang,” a human machine’s identity has to toy with the audience.

“Sheep in the Box” starts off like a gentle piece of futuristic sci-fi, as Otone receives an everyday delivery package via drone. There’s some token humor, as when Kensuke compares the new Kakeru to a Roomba, which becomes a running joke. And when the boy reveals that he can reel off the names of all the local train stops, we’re supposed to be as dazzled as Otone is. (We’re not.) Part of the problem is that Otone, whose maternal feelings are the heart of the story, is a strangely one-note character. There’s a subplot about how she’s struggling to design a geometric home for a family that has hired her, and while her analog house models are lovely, it remains unclear what the hold-up is.

In movies, few things age faster than a technology parable, be it “The Stepford Wives” or a ’90s Internet thriller like “The Net.” The AI movies that will undoubtedly soon be upon us are likely to have a short half-life. But in the case of “Sheep in the Box,” the film’s perceptions already feel musty and behind the curve; it’s like the thinnest of satires played weirdly straight. The title comes from “The Little Prince,” a book Kakeru reads, and from what I can gather the notion of a sheep in the box refers to that thing we call a soul. Does the humanoid Kekaru have one? The movie also references this idea by having Kakeru establish a relationship with trees, which are plants that are said to have souls. The “Can machines think?” paradigm — or, more to the point, “Can machines feel?” — is destined to be central to the new wave of tech fairy tales. The trouble with “Sheep in the Box” is that it never makes up its mind about this question, perhaps because Kore-eda wants to have it both ways: to portray Kakeru as an adorable moppet and a cautionary icon of the cold future.