‘Sheep in the Box’ Review: A Married Couple Adopt a Robot Copy of Their Dead Son in Hirokazu Koreeda’s Emotionally Stilted Riff on ‘A.I.’

Cannes: Koreeda begs us not to delegate our imaginations to AI in a winsome grief drama that lacks feeling.

A master sentimentalist like Hirokazu Koreeda riffing on a movie as soul-obliterating as Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” sounds like a surefire recipe for the tear-jerker of the year, so I was surprised to discover that “Sheep in the Box” is one of the most emotionally stunted dramas the “Monster” auteur has ever made. 

To some extent, that’s by design, as the original script’s two major human characters — a fortysomething married couple in sunny near-future Kamakura — start to lose their place in the grieving process after they adopt an AI-powered humanoid modeled after their dead seven-year-old son. But unlike “After Life,” in which Koreeda previously explored the lingering effects of memory, or the under-seen “Air Doll,” in which he contemplated the potential consciousness of an inflatable sex toy, or even “Like Father, Like Son,” in which he detailed the complications of exchanging one child for another, “Sheep in the Box” is less concerned with feelings than it is with our impulse to elide them. 

To that point, the most curious aspect about Koreeda’s latest film is that Kensuke Komoto (the mononymous Daigo, punchy and well-textured) and his architect wife Otone (Haruka Ayase) already seem to have achieved a certain degree of acceptance when the story begins. It’s been two years since their adorable son Kakeru was killed in a train-related accident of some kind, and while they’ll always be profoundly wounded by his loss, life appears to have gotten back on track as best it can. We don’t bear witness to any secret crying jags or unhelpful resentments (at least not yet). By day, Otone helps her clients meld wood and glass into the beautiful new home she’s drawing for them, and by night, Kensuke goes to baseball games with his work friends. 

Alas, AI companies can’t profit off a family’s closure, and so — in an unspeakably cruel act that Koreeda conveys with a tinsel-light touch — the REbirth company sends a drone to spam the Komoto’s house with an advertisement for a free trial of their humanoid program, which currently has some 3,000 users across Japan. Otone is tempted by the prospect against her will, while the more cynical Kensuke rolls his eyes at the thought of adopting a child-sized “Tamagotchi,” but, without any disagreement between them, they decide to give it a whirl. 

Unlike in “A.I.,” where Haley Joel Osment’s David was programmed to lead with an uncanny kind of love, robo-Kakeru — Rimu Kuwaki, adding yet another flawless child performance to Koreeda’s filmography — is just sort of happy to be there. Kensuke treats him like a glorified Roomba, while Otone teaches him how to garden and makes sure he never gets wet. This Kakeru can’t eat or bathe, he won’t grow or get mad, and his software automatically shuts down if he gets more than 30 meters away from one of his parents. He’s not meant to be a replacement for their dead child so much as a visible placeholder for his memory, like an interactive and possibly sentient hologram of some old home video footage. They can’t send him to college, but Otone can take him to the playground for old time’s sake when the mood strikes. 

Limiting itself to the first act of Spielberg’s film (aside from a few curious detours concerning a spate of recent child abductions in the neighborhood), “Sheep in the Box” meanders through a series of relatively predictable developments. Kensuke catches himself delighting in some of the same rituals he used to share with his son, while Otone — newly moved to weaponize some lingering frustrations against her mother — has fun springing Kakeru 2.0 on her without warning. In a film that gently chides its characters for outsourcing their most personal emotions to a battery-powered golem (and for claiming an unnatural ownership over the dead), it’s telling that Otone finds real and cathartic pleasure in using fake Kakeru as a conduit to confront her buried feelings, rather than just to place them in a “living” jar. 

At one point, Otone reads “The Little Prince” to the robot at night, as Koreeda makes sure to triple-underline the passage that gives this film its title. It has to do with a stranded pilot who, frustrated by his inability to draw a sheep to the Prince’s satisfaction, ultimately draws a box with some air holes and says, “Your sheep is in there.” In a film that often cleaves a bit closer to Demi Moore’s school of thought (her “We have to find a way to work with ChatGPT or else” propaganda expressed here through a less hostile, more holistic marriage between technology and nature), citing Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s plea for imagination in the face of an increasingly literal future is the most explicit critique Koreeda is willing to make against AI. 

During a brief scene where Kensuke glancingly bemoans how we’ve evolved to provide the frictionlessness of convenience over the foothold of struggle, I was reminded of a memorable excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano”: “People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply anymore. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves.” I found myself returning to that passage with even greater focus later in the film, when the human characters and their humanoid creations become increasingly aligned in their thinking about what a sustainable dynamic between them might look like. 

Rescuing utopian idyll from dystopian reality, Koreeda determines that humanity is too fragile to forfeit its defining qualities to a mechanical species; that our only viable function in an artificial tomorrow is as the eternal caretakers of memory and imagination. To that end, “Sheep in the Box” is at its most incisive — and least affecting — when it starts to afford Kakeru his own vague sense of agency. 

Relieved as I was that Koreeda’s film achieves an identity of its own alongside its robotic co-lead, its rose-colored ethos about the future obliviates so much of the pain that it visits upon Otone and Kensuke in the present. The result is a grief drama that only adds up in retrospect, as Koreeda’s bright, bright summer sunshine and intrusively uplifting wind instruments — both of which serve to flatten and suffocate a story that’s ostensibly about two parents dealing with the second-most destabilizing episode of their lives — don’t feel in sync with the story until it moves into the post-human space that Kakeru has occupied from the start. “Sheep in the Box” pleads for our imagination at the same time as it makes it almost impossible to believe what’s right in front of our eyes. 

Grade: B-

“Sheep in the Box” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters later this year.

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