By John Corrado
Sheep in the Box, named for a passage in The Little Prince, is the latest work from Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, who has proven himself a master of quietly observed character studies that raise thorny emotional questions.
On paper, at least, this makes Kore-eda, serving as both writer and director, a natural fit for a story about a grieving couple and their robot “son.” But, in combining aspects of his earlier works, including resurrecting themes about childhood and family relationships, he delivers something with Sheep in the Box that feels like a bit of a tonally uneven hodge-podge.
The film centres around Otone (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), a couple who experienced the death of their young son. To help them through the grieving process, they are offered a humanoid robot modelled after the 7-year-old boy. Enter Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), an inquisitive young android powered by cutting edge artificial intelligence, having been fed and trained on photos and videos of the real boy he is replacing.
Like Kogonada’s similarly android-themed 2021 film After Yang, Sheep in the Box is the sort of movie that takes a science-fiction premise and uses it primarily as the basis for a human story. Despite the sci-fi undertones, this is really a family drama about how a couple processes grief. Otone finds it easier to bond with the robot boy, while Kensuke struggles to form an emotional connection, even insisting that he not be called dad and simply “Mr. Komoto.”
This seems like natural territory for Kore-eda, and in a sense it is, but many of these ideas felt explored more fully in his previous works. Here, he doesn’t always find the right tone between sentimentality, fantasy, and more grounded character drama. The subplots don’t all work, including a storyline involving other robot kids that feels underdeveloped. Some attempts at humour fall flat, with the film also occasionally veering into melodrama.
It doesn’t have the same emotional impact that was clearly intended. If Steven Spielberg’s A.I. was an obvious inspiration, Sheep in the Box lacks the dark wonder and emotional gut-punch of that one. The ending goes on too long, and raises more questions than it answers. Still, a more minor work from Kore-eda is still one with enough artistic and humanistic value to recommend, even if Sheep in the Box is a decidedly uneven effort from him overall.
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