‘Sheep in the Box’ Cannes Review: Kore-eda Enters the Uncanny Valley

Twenty-five years on from Steven Spielberg’s experiment working from a Stanley Kubrick idea in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, there are more reasons than ever to revisit a premise that once felt like the purest science fiction — and now feels considerably less so. We’ve heard endlessly about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world around us, and cinema has deployed it across dozens of projects, but far less attention has been paid to how it might transform personal and family life in a future that may not be so distant after all. What Hirokazu Kore-eda imagines in Sheep in the Box may still lie some way off, but thematically, we’re closer than we’d like to think.

In the Japanese director’s film, a couple — Kensuke (Daigo) and his wife Otone (Haruka Ayase), an architect — lost their seven-year-old son Kakeru in a train accident two years before the story begins. A drone delivers a promotional offer inviting them to participate in a free trial of an experimental program called REBirth, run by a company specializing in humanoids. The offer is straightforward and deeply unsettling: they will receive a child identical to their own, programmed with whatever information they’re willing to provide about him. The difference, of course, is that he’s a robot — one that charges and rests, powers on and off, doesn’t eat, shouldn’t get wet, and must stay within thirty meters of them at all times, lest a GPS signal shut him down.

Otone is the more tempted of the two, drawn to the idea of having some version of her son back in the house. Kensuke is far less convinced — «it’s like a Roomba,» he says. But to keep the peace, he agrees, and soon a version of Kakeru is living with them: recognizable, yet inevitably a little mechanical, a little off. The discomfort of the early days gradually softens. The boy helps Otone with her architectural models — a hobby to which the film devotes a generous amount of time — and begins recapturing old routines with Kensuke, learning to play baseball together the way they once did.

Then things start to quietly unravel: family tensions — Otone’s mother is a problem in her own right — strained relationships with neighbors, a handful of awkward incidents, and the growing realization that this Kakeru is not the only humanoid in the neighborhood. Others like him exist nearby, and they seem to recognize one another. They may be planning something. The screenplay from the director of After Life takes a few more turns, though not toward confrontation — rather, it reaches for some possible common ground between humans and their robot counterparts, echoing in its own way E.T., Spielberg’s other film with an acronym for a title.

And yet, for all the genuinely unsettling ideas the film raises — we are not so far from a world where artificial intelligence could archive much of a dead person’s memory and reproduce it as though they were still alive — Kore-eda never quite manages to push beyond his own premise. Sheep in the Box is unusually cold, repetitive, and oddly reluctant to make full use of the dramatic material at its disposal. His instinct to seek harmony rather than escalate conflict is intellectually interesting, but the subplot involving the other humanoids feels stranded, disconnected from the main story in ways the film never resolves.

Thematically, the film connects to nearly everything in the work of a director who has long been preoccupied with unconventional family bonds — children raised by other parents, children with no parents at all, all manner of improvised kinship (Like Father, Like Son, Nobody Knows, Shoplifters, Broker) — as well as his interest in memory (After Life) and the technological objects that quietly shape our lives (Air Doll). The pairing of filmmaker and subject feels, on paper, like a natural fit. But despite everything working in its favor, Sheep in the Box never quite takes flight. It never accumulates the dramatic weight or emotional pull it seems to be reaching for. It’s as if the film itself were made in the same register as its subject: assembled with care, but somehow never fully alive, in that same slightly frozen future in which the story takes place. And what if the director were a humanoid version of Kore-eda himself. Could he be?