Sheep in the Box Review: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s New A.I. Family Drama Is Emotionally Stilted

I’m a bit surprised by just how much Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film Sheep in the Box is in conversation with, and at times feels like a direct riff on, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. For one of Japan’s great humanist and sentimental filmmakers, it’s easy at first glance to see why this material would interest him. Artificial intelligence has advanced so rapidly over the last few years, and the seismic impact it’s had on popular culture and everyday life gives Kore-eda plenty of avenues to explore questions of grief, humanity, family, and what exactly it means to recreate a person. He’s also releasing two films in 2026, with this being the first alongside another remake/riff on Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s Look Back, so there’s clearly an interest in taking existing material and finding his own way into it. The frustrating part is that Sheep in the Box doesn’t always find that angle. For a filmmaker whose recent work has been so emotionally precise, this is surprisingly emotionally stilted, and the ways its world expands beyond the central family feel similarly underdeveloped.

The movie begins with an aptly named private artificial intelligence company called REbirth, which markets directly to couples who have lost children. One such couple is Otone, an architect played by Haruka Ayase, and her husband Kensuke, a construction worker played by Daigo Yamamoto. They lost their son Kakeru, portrayed in humanoid form by Kuwaki Rimu, in a hit-and-run accident two years earlier. They haven’t exactly moved on, because it’s frankly impossible to fully move on from something that tragic, but they’ve found some stability and distance from the accident itself. They’re successful in their respective careers, they’ve built a quiet life together, and they’ve found a way to exist as a household of just two. Then REbirth’s marketing materials offer them the impossible: a 1:1 replica of their son, complete with his memories, emotions, and personality. They attend the presentations, go through the paperwork, mull over the implications, and ultimately decide to bring him home.

This is where Kore-eda finds the most interesting version of the story, because he’s much more compelling when he’s psychologizing Otone and Kensuke than when he’s trying to explain Kakeru himself. Watching these parents slowly accept this new child, recognize pieces of the son they lost, and then realize that those pieces aren’t necessarily enough is genuinely devastating. There is something especially cruel about watching Otone’s hope and sense of closure gradually disappear as Kakeru exhibits knowledge, instincts, and behaviors that the real Kakeru never would have possessed. REbirth can only build this child out of the slivers of information Otone and Kensuke provide, and there’s simply no way to mine seven or eight years of a young person’s life and perfectly reproduce all of the memories, quirks, instincts, and personality traits that made them who they were. The movie understands the horror of that false promise, and for stretches, it hits a really sad idea: the technology isn’t necessarily failing because it can’t recreate their son; it’s failing because the company convinced them that their son was ever something that could be recreated in the first place.

Unfortunately, Sheep in the Box starts pulling itself in a handful of different directions, one of which feels very familiar. Kakeru routinely meets with abandoned humanoid children in rundown warehouses and empty buildings, and together they use their combined knowledge to make art and explore everything their programming and databases have to offer beyond simply serving as a stay-at-home prototype for the son Otone and Kensuke lost. It’s the most obvious point of comparison to A.I., and what’s interesting is that Kore-eda seems to take the side of the AI children here. There’s a surprising warmth toward the technology itself, while the sharper criticism is directed at the private companies that develop it and then use it to capitalize on people who are grieving, vulnerable, or desperate enough to spend whatever they have for the promise of comfort. That’s a pretty compelling angle, especially coming from Kore-eda, but the movie never quite develops it into something as substantial as the premise suggests it could be.

One of my bigger grievances is that Kore-eda’s films are often at their best when they’re out exploring the worlds their characters occupy, and Sheep in the Box is unusually restrictive in that regard. Much of the movie is confined to the same household that Kakeru himself is similarly confined to, which creates an interesting thematic parallel but also limits Kore-eda’s usually gorgeous humanistic environments. There is a pseudo-futuristic texture here that I really like: everything is overwhelmingly bright, clean, and deceptively hopeful, as if this is a world designed to look optimistic even while the people living inside it are steadily losing that feeling. But we’re tied to that modern architecture for such long stretches that you begin to tune it out. I kept wanting Kore-eda to step outside of the house and show me more of the society that created this technology and decided that resurrecting dead children was something that could be packaged and sold.

Sheep in the Box took a bit of a beating critically at Cannes and the festivals that followed, and while I wouldn’t go quite that far, I understand the reaction. This is a step down for Kore-eda, particularly because there are glimpses of a more devastating movie buried inside it. The material about Otone and Kensuke confronting the limitations of their artificial son has real weight, and I kept wishing Kore-eda would key in harder on that aspect of the story rather than continually expanding into familiar A.I. territory. The irony is that this movie feels simultaneously too prescient and not prescient enough. It’s clearly responding to something enormous happening in the real world right now, but it doesn’t always find a new angle on the most basic questions that come with it.