‘Sheep in a Box’ Review: Koreeda’s Take on the AI-ification of Humanity Feels a Bit Soulless [C] Cannes

Hirokazu Koreeda’s Cannes competition entry, Sheep in the Box — in which grieving parents adopt an A.I. replica of their dead child — invites inevitable comparison to A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Yet if the premise recalls Steven Spielberg’s melancholy futurism, the film itself belongs unmistakably to Koreeda’s own cinematic universe of substitute intimacies and improvised domestic arrangements. The trouble is that Koreeda continues to approach these arrangements through the haze of sentimental idealization, brushing past the practical, legal, and moral implications with the same incurious benevolence that has increasingly calcified into habit.

Set in a near future where delivery drones swarm the skyline like mechanized insects, the film opens with Otone (Ayase Haruka) receiving a curious plastic object that unfurls into the shape of a heart, projecting the hologram of a fluttering butterfly — a message, supposedly, from the dead. A prerecorded voice informs her that if she is not yet ready to forget, REbirth is there to help. Better still, the service is complimentary for those whose loved ones were lost to accident or violent crime. Koreeda stages the scene with his customary softness, but beneath the film’s muted pastel surfaces lies something chillingly corporate: grief repackaged as customer retention.

It is apparently the third time the company has contacted Otone and her husband, Kensuke (Daigo). At REbirth headquarters, they sit through an in-house promotional video that Kensuke dismisses as mawkish while Otone quietly breaks into tears. Soon afterward, they encounter a humanoid whose gestures trigger memories of a visit to Tokyo Tower with their late son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki). Back home, Otone begins selecting photographs and video clips to upload to the company’s servers, curating her son’s afterlife through data entry.

When the replica of Kakeru arrives in a van, the uncanny spectacle is played with a disarming matter-of-factness. The humanoid immediately addresses the couple as mama and papa, a familiarity that visibly unsettles Kensuke, who insists on being called “mister” instead. His skepticism initially manifests as deadpan ridicule: to him, the replica is little more than a Tamagotchi or an especially sophisticated Roomba, especially as Otone pores over the instruction manual warning against food and bathing. Yet Koreeda, predictably, nudges him toward acceptance. Kensuke softens as the humanoid recites train stops with the same obsessive enthusiasm the real Kakeru once possessed. Before long, the replica begins absorbing knowledge from the couple’s jobs as architect and contractor, learning through observation with unnerving efficiency.

Koreeda has circled variations of surrogate existence before, whether in Air Doll or Like Father, Like Son, but here he once again folds the material back into his preferred subject: the sanctity of the chosen family, a theme that has defined works like Shoplifters and Broker. Increasingly, though, Koreeda treats this worldview less as a question than as an article of faith. The films no longer interrogate these familial constructions so much as bathe in their presumed emotional nobility. Difficult ethical dilemmas dissolve into warm reassurance.

As Otone, Kensuke, and their extended family debate whether keeping the humanoid Kakeru constitutes healing or denial, the replica quietly begins forging connections with others of its kind, edging toward decisions of its own. Simultaneously, several children in the surrounding area are reported missing, prompting rumors of a serial abductor. Koreeda introduces these narrative threads with the suggestion of darker inquiry, only to abandon them almost as quickly. The possible connection between the disappearances and the humanoids remains frustratingly underdeveloped, less an ambiguity than a narrative shrug. What initially hints at moral or philosophical complication ultimately recedes into yet another variation on Koreeda’s familiar consolations.

The film’s central conflict — whether to embrace the artificial Kakeru or to relinquish the real one — eventually reveals itself to be dramatically weightless, because Koreeda refuses to pursue the question to any genuinely uncomfortable conclusion. Sheep in the Box gestures toward grief, artificial consciousness, and emotional dependency without ever probing the psychic or societal consequences of any of them. In the end, he offers little beyond the comforting assurance that the kids, even the manufactured ones, will somehow be alright. For a filmmaker once capable of excavating profound emotional contradictions from ordinary lives, that assurance feels more evasive than humane.

Grade: C

This review is from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival where Sheep in a Box had its world premiere In Competition. NEON will distribute the film theatrically in the U.S.