{"id":444991,"date":"2026-05-16T16:24:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T16:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/444991\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T16:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T16:24:08","slug":"sheep-in-the-box-review-hirokazu-koreeda-riffs-on-spielbergs-a-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/444991\/","title":{"rendered":"Sheep in the Box Review: Hirokazu Koreeda Riffs on Spielberg’s A.I."},"content":{"rendered":"

A master sentimentalist like Hirokazu Koreeda<\/a> riffing on a movie as soul-obliterating as Steven Spielberg\u2019s \u201cA.I. Artificial Intelligence<\/a>\u201d sounds like a surefire recipe for the tear-jerker of the year, so I was surprised to discover that \u201cSheep in the Box<\/a>\u201d is one of the most emotionally stunted dramas the \u201cMonster\u201d auteur has ever made.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To some extent, that\u2019s by design, as the original script\u2019s two major human characters \u2014 a fortysomething married couple in sunny near-future Kamakura \u2014 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 \u201cAfter Life,<\/a>\u201d in which Koreeda previously explored the lingering effects of memory, or the under-seen \u201cAir Doll,\u201d in which he contemplated the potential consciousness of an inflatable sex toy, or even \u201cLike Father, Like Son,\u201d in which he detailed the complications of exchanging one child for another, \u201cSheep in the Box\u201d is less concerned with feelings than it is with our impulse to elide them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"La<\/a> \"Forever<\/a> <\/p>\n

To that point, the most curious aspect about Koreeda\u2019s latest film<\/a> 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\u2019s been two years since their adorable son Kakeru was killed in a train-related accident of some kind, and while they\u2019ll always be profoundly wounded by his loss, life appears to have gotten back on track as best it can. We don\u2019t 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\u2019s drawing for them, and by night, Kensuke goes to baseball games with his work friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alas, AI companies can\u2019t profit off a family\u2019s closure, and so \u2014\u00a0in an unspeakably cruel act that Koreeda conveys with a tinsel-light touch \u2014 the REbirth company sends a drone to spam the Komoto\u2019s 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 \u201cTamagotchi,\u201d but, without any disagreement between them, they decide to give it a whirl.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unlike in \u201cA.I.,\u201d where Haley Joel Osment\u2019s David was programmed to lead with an uncanny kind of love, robo-Kakeru \u2014\u00a0Rimu Kuwaki, adding yet another flawless child performance to Koreeda\u2019s filmography \u2014\u00a0is 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\u2019t eat or bathe, he won\u2019t grow or get mad, and his software automatically shuts down if he gets more than 30 meters away from one of his parents. He\u2019s 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\u2019t send him to college, but Otone can take him to the playground for old time\u2019s sake when the mood strikes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Limiting itself to the first act of Spielberg\u2019s film (aside from a few curious detours concerning a spate of recent child abductions in the neighborhood), \u201cSheep in the Box\u201d 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 \u2014 newly moved to weaponize some lingering frustrations against her mother \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u201cliving\u201d jar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At one point, Otone reads \u201cThe Little Prince\u201d 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\u2019s satisfaction, ultimately draws a box with some air holes and says, \u201cYour sheep is in there.\u201d In a film that often cleaves a bit closer to Demi Moore\u2019s school of thought (her \u201cWe have to find a way to work with ChatGPT or else\u201d propaganda expressed here through a less hostile, more holistic marriage between technology and nature), citing Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry\u2019s plea for imagination in the face of an increasingly literal future is the most explicit critique Koreeda is willing to make against AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During a brief scene where Kensuke glancingly bemoans how we\u2019ve evolved to provide the frictionlessness of convenience over the foothold of struggle, I was reminded of a memorable excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s \u201cPlayer Piano\u201d: \u201cPeople are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don\u2019t apply anymore. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, \u201cSheep in the Box\u201d is at its most incisive \u2014\u00a0and least affecting \u2014 when it starts to afford Kakeru his own vague sense of agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Relieved as I was that Koreeda\u2019s 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\u2019s bright, bright summer sunshine and intrusively uplifting wind instruments \u2014 both of which serve to flatten and suffocate a story that\u2019s ostensibly about two parents dealing with the second-most destabilizing episode of their lives \u2014 don\u2019t feel in sync with the story until it moves into the post-human space that Kakeru has occupied from the start. \u201cSheep in the Box\u201d pleads for our imagination at the same time as it makes it almost impossible to believe what\u2019s right in front of our eyes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cSheep in the Box\u201d premiered at the 2026 Cannes<\/a> Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters later this year.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A master sentimentalist like Hirokazu Koreeda riffing on a movie as soul-obliterating as Steven Spielberg\u2019s \u201cA.I. Artificial Intelligence\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[27993,146,878,85,46,397,1530,82692],"class_list":["post-444991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-sheep-in-the-box"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}