OVERVIEW
A grieving couple in near-future Japan accepts a free offer from a company called ReBirth: a humanoid child built to look and sound exactly like the seven-year-old son they lost two years earlier.
BACKGROUND
The path to Sheep in the Box runs through the AI conversation that has dominated the last three years of cultural discourse, and through the smaller, less-reported corner of it concerned with the dead. Kore-eda came across an article about Chinese companies offering generative AI services to bring deceased relatives back for conversation, met one of the entrepreneurs working in the field that fall, and turned the encounter into the eighth Competition film of his Cannes career. The project also satisfied a long-standing private wish to write his own Frankenstein, which he has now mentioned in interviews, and for a director who has spent thirty years deconstructing Japanese society’s definition of family, it only makes sense that the creature would arrive as a small boy the parents have to decide whether to love.
THE REVIEW
Kore-eda has been unusually explicit that he wanted a story and a resolution that “distinguishes itself from a traditional dystopia,” especially the kind found in Western cinema, a claim that becomes awkward as the film unfolds into what is essentially a 25-years-later remake of the first act of Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, beat for beat, only drier and more nondescript. The same questions are raised, like can the family accept the child that looks and sounds just like the one they lost, and does a robot programmed to earn parental love eventually come to have a soul of its own.
It shocks how much Sheep in the Box follows the established path, becoming a thinner version of the other that makes you wish you were watching that one instead, and I say this as someone who is not even the biggest fan of the 2001 Spielberg film. The father initially despising the droid, the mother initially accepting then refusing. The parents fighting over how much of the boy is still their son. The droid learning to read the room. The Pinocchio parallel is swapped for the much weaker, obvious one around The Little Prince. None of it lands.
The parts that stray from the basic premise, especially the subplot about the boy meeting other droids in the forest who are plotting some kind of small utopia of their own, are also largely uninteresting. By now, “the robot has a soul too” is one of science fiction’s most tired tropes, and the film treats it like a fresh, innovative discovery.
Kore-eda also feels uncomfortable in sci-fi territory, almost ashamed of his own sci-fi elements. The greatest advancement in his view of the future is a TV projector that doesn’t require a physical projector. Fascinating. The robot dismantling scene at the ReBirth lab, where Kakeru’s skin is sliced open to reveal circuitry and chemical fluids, is the one moment the film commits to its genre, and it sits in the runtime like a visitor from another movie. The provocation to family structure that runs through the director’s best work is muted, with the only scene that brings anything new being one in which the mother reprimands the boy for looking at her with too much attention and care, far more than the rigidly raised real boy ever would have.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Every review has compared this film to Spielberg’s 2001 sci-fi, but when the results are this similar, the comparison becomes impossible to avoid. Kore-eda retreads the material seen in that film and many others, while struggling to differentiate his work from any of it. The result is as cold and unfeeling as an android forever turned off.
- Where to watch
- In Theaters
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
Play trailer
- Original title
- 箱の中の羊
- Director
- Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Genre
- Drama, Science Fiction
- Cast
- Haruka Ayase, Daigo Yamamoto, Kuwaki Rimu, Nana Seino, Kanichiro, Hinata Hiiragi, Akihiro Kakuta, Kayo Noro
- Rated
- PG
- Screenwriter
- Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Composer
- Yuta Bandoh
- Cinematography
- Ryuto Kondo
- Editor
- Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Country
- Language
- Japanese
- Box office
- $4.294 million