Daigo Yamamoto, Haruka Ayase, and Rimu Kuwaki in Sheep in the Box.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
Sheep in the Box
Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring Haruka Ayase, Daigo Yamamoto and Rimu Kuwaki
Classification N/A; 127 minutes
Opens in select theatres July 31
The new Japanese sci-fi drama Sheep in the Box arrived at the Cannes Film Festival this past spring with seemingly all the perfect elements in place.
The film was the follow-up for Hirokazu Kore-eda to his wonderfully touching and enigmatic 2023 drama Monster, the best film in his storied career. It carried a high-concept pitch – a couple adopts an AI-assisted robot, designed to look like their recently deceased son – that felt poignantly of the moment. And Japan just so happened to be the “country of honour” at this year’s edition of Cannes, a festival that previously handed Kore-eda the coveted Palme d’Or prize (for his 2018 drama Shoplifters). Surely, Sheep in the Box would notch a high-water mark for the filmmaker.
Unfortunately, from almost its opening minute, it’s clear that Kore-eda’s latest film represents a stunning misstep. A tonally uneven, blandly shot and rather unoriginally imagined riff on Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (not to mention a half-dozen other films), Sheep in the Box is a true head-scratcher – as if Kore-eda himself had been replaced by some digitally conceived facsimile.
Again, the potential for something thematically interesting is there. There is one moment in particular, when the couple, Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), first visit the cutting-edge company that promises to cure them of their parental woes via a robotic surrogate son (played with gentle enough grace by Rimu Kuwaki). Kore-eda immediately recognizes the queasy tension that such a proposition represents, with the Big Tech professionals behind the offer gleefully oblivious to the dangers that they represent to society at large. But too quickly, the story’s dynamics settle into something resembling a half-witted sitcom – which might explain the casting of Yamamoto, one of Japan’s leading comedians.
By the time that Kore-eda expands the story into something of a robots-unite adventure tale, it’s hard to care whether humanity is doomed or not. This is a soft movie, in form and ideas, that badly needed a system upgrade before a single frame was shot.