Sheep in the Box: a jarringly sentimental exploration of AI and grief

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

Sheep in the Box opens in “the not too distant future,” per an onscreen title card, as a delivery drone flies through the air like a stork, to deposit not a baby but an advertisement to the home of Otone (Ayase Haruka) and Kensuke (Yamamoto Daigo), a married couple grieving the loss of their young son two years prior. The advertisement is for a company which will build them a replacement: an AI-powered humanoid robot with the appearance of their late Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki).

Otone and Kensuke’s divergent openness to the idea – she’s not ready to move on; he thinks it’s appalling, “like a psychic’s sales pitch” – seems to signal that they’re on the road to becoming one of the many couples who separate in the wake of a bereavement, lost in (self-)recrimination and unable to reconcile their different approaches to loss. But, offered a free prototype, they accept. This new Kakeru is, in subtle ways, more like a companion robot – he can’t eat, go in the water, or leave home without triggering his GPS – but he has the physical appearance and basic personality of the old one, including his love of trains, thanks to the curated selection of photos and videos Otone and Kensuke feed to the algorithm.

Kakeru does not attend school, and it is never made clear if or how he will age. His mental age is set to 7 by his parents, but he proves himself a quick study: Otone is an architect and Kensuke a carpenter, and robot boy soon endears himself to the former and breaks down the resistance of the latter by training himself on their trades. With Otone, he quickly develops an apprentice-level fluency in modernist design principles; from a wise old man at Kensuke’s workshop, he learns a love of wood, and develops a habit of holding his ear close to tree trunks, hearing in the grain the beams it will become.

This is taken by Otone and Kensuke as evidence that this Kakeru truly shares their DNA, though another way to look at it would be to say that AIs mirror the behaviour of their users, and that Koreeda’s characters, like lonely souls in love with ChatGPT or driven to violence by it, are merely responding to sycophancy. This is not the intention of a film scored to tender cello and distinguished visually by gentle upward-gazing compositions of leafy branches illuminated by the radiant sun (family trees, both metaphorical and literal, are a major motif). Sheep in the Box, which has no shortage of blunt declarations, has characters state quite explicitly that Kakeru is a member of a new species evolving in symbiosis with humanity, and double-underlines this with sentimental metaphors around both his parents’ work. Otone is designing a mansion, to be erected on a former woodland; struggling to integrate organic and synthetic materials, she eventually devises a planting scheme that will make the new house resemble (but not actually be) the old forest. And when placing his ear to wood, Kakeru listens to the soul in all things.

If Kakeru is a new species coevolving with Otone and Kensuke, one way to conceptualise this relationship would be as parasite and host; another would be as child and parents, and it is this premise, which one character states outright, on which the film settles.

Talk about the uncanny valley: Koreeda has covered remarkably similar territory to this before, in his 2009 sex-doll Pinocchio tale Air Doll. This time, a story centred around grief and parental imprinting also makes Sheep in the Box appear a wan, weepy echo of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), without Spielberg’s emotional and speculative grandeur. Sheep in the Box also recalls A.I.: Artificial Intelligence when Kakeru finds his way into an island-of-misfit-toys collective of abused and mistreated robots, now living autonomously. Free to evolve on their own, they, like the found family of Koreeda’s Shoplifters (2018) and the abandoned children of his Nobody Knows (2004), are a haven in opposition to the cruelties of the mainstream world.

In comparison to the calibrated everyone-has-their-reasons empathy of Koreeda in top form (as seen in the artfully constructed Shoplifters) Sheep in the Box feels cloying and obvious. It’s also incredibly dubious. He is a filmmaker who extends grace to, and sometimes slathers it on, all characters equally; here, he extends it to avatars of an emerging superintelligence in a narrative that will most appeal to AI accelerationists.