Some Tech CEO Is Going To Seriously Misread Hirokazu Koreeda’s New AI Grieving Movie

In the same way that Sam Altman sees the Spike Jonze movie Her as aspirational, some tech founder hyping one of those dystopian startups that promises to clone your dead loved ones with AI is going to watch Sheep in the Box someday and decide it’s practically an endorsement, which it is not.

Sheep in the Box is the latest film from Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan’s leading director of deceptively gentle-seeming dramas, and it takes place in a near future in which a bereaved couple decide to lease a robot copy of their child, who died two years ago. Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) is an architect while her husband Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) is a woodworker, and they haven’t been mourning their son Kakeru so much as they’ve been burying their feelings in their work and a display of normalcy. Then a company called REbirth ships a dainty advertisement to Otone — they were apparently, less tastefully, also at Kakeru’s funeral — and the bereaved woman is feeling vulnerable enough to sign them up for an informational session. REbirth makes “humanoids,” androids tailored to look like a deceased loved one and powered by generative AI that’s been fed with photos and home videos.

While eating at the company cafe after the presentation, Otone and Kensuke meet a child version of a humanoid who’s been brought back to REbirth HQ for maintenance. While his mother cheerfully and alarmingly shares that she basically lives for this artificial echo of her late son now, all the Komoto focus on is how lifelike the robot is. Sheep in the Box isn’t blazing new territory here in terms of premise — it’s treading down paths that were blazed by A.I. Artificial Intelligence and, yes, Her, albeit much closer to a reality in which some version of the technology portrayed on screen is going to be on offer. The difference is that, due to that proximity and to the Koreeda of it all, Sheep in the Box exudes a melancholy resignation about the idea that humanity is going to do this rather than being driven to explore whether humanity should. It’s a movie that, in terms of sentiment, feels of a kind with his past work about abandoned children living on their own in Nobody Know, a ragtag found family in Shoplifters, and an inflatable doll that comes to life in Air Doll. In other words, Sheep in the Box regards AI creations as just more things for society to fail, even if the Komotos do their best to be kind.

They are kind, mostly, even if Otone initially gloms onto the replacement Kakeru so intensely that she seems poised to give herself a more advanced version of chatbot psychosis by convincing herself that there’s something different and exceptional and real about their humanoid. He is only meant to be a dark mirror, or, as a REbirth technician puts it, a “product of your past,” and that past is something that Otone and Kensuke have both been thinking of selectively while blaming themselves for what happened. Both of them misunderstand in different ways how Kakeru works. Otone, who has a difficult relationship with her own amusingly pushy mother, tries to make up with her own perceived maternal shortcomings by only providing REbirth with happy videos and photos of her late son to draw from, the source material equivalent of feeling the need to put on a full face of makeup before going outside. Kensuke is more resistant to the new Kakeru at first, comparing him to a Tamagotchi and a Roomba and asking that he be referred to as “mister” rather than “dad.” But when Kakeru recognizes a kindergarten classmate while on an outing to the aquarium, Kensuke also makes the leap into believing that the robot could somehow know more than the material on which he was trained, and starts bringing him around to the sites of his last day, hoping to learn some culprit was behind the accident that claimed the boy’s life.

There’s something disturbing about watching these already commonplace delusions about ChatGPT — Your particular version has a soul! It knows everything! — be channeled into relationships with a synthetic being played by an adorable child actor. But Koreeda doesn’t have it in him to make an alarmist dystopian tale, and Sheep in the Box remains tender and sun-dappled as it eventually steers its main human characters toward healing. Otone and Kensuke’s respective grapplings with grief, while delicately handled, are ultimately less memorable than the elements happened to the sides of the film, from the scene in which Kakeru crushes some bugs in his hand to listen to what they sound like when dead to the meetings he secretly conducts with other humanoids nearby. Sheep in the Box takes its terrible title from the second chapter in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, in which the narrator, frustrated at his drawings of sheep being deemed inadequate by the character of the title, draws a box and says there’s a sheep inside. The nature of Kakeru’s own interiority is left something of a mystery throughout Sheep in the Box, though by the end, it’s clear that if he and his kind endure, it’s because humanity is so unable to get outside its own ingrained habits and limitations that it can’t possibly last.