Stanley Kubrick was unable to crack an adaptation of the short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” in his lifetime; it was only when passed to Steven Spielberg that it became clear the best path was approaching this tale of loneliness as a futuristic Pinocchio. Hirokazu Koreeda has followed in the footsteps of A.I: Artificial Intelligence by finding an entry into the stereotypically sterile world of dystopian science fiction via Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, in which the narrator is asked by the young prince to draw a sheep inside a box, failing at each attempt until he draws an empty square a sheep can be imagined inside.
Told mostly from the perspective of the parents rather than their artificially reimagined son, Koreeda’s Sheep in the Box attempts to grapple with well-worn sci-fi ideas of android personhood and sentience through that incredibly overstated idea, asking whether it’s possible to overcome grief and build an emotional connection with a device that merely resembles a loved one. It’s not remotely groundbreaking terrain and, if anything, feels outdated for refusing to examine the darker edges of this world. We don’t come to Koreeda for tech cynicism, but his inherent humanism is why he might be the most ill-suited filmmaker to tell this story right now.
Architect Otone (Haruka Ayase) and construction worker Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) are still grieving the death of their son Kakeru (Rimu Kawaki), which has just passed its second anniversary. At the funeral, the mourning parents were approached by RE:Birth, a company which creates humanoid replicas of loved ones who were killed “in accidents or crimes,” and two years on, they’re still eligible for a free trial. Kensuke is apprehensive, but goes along with Otone, and the pair are won over after interacting with another grieving mother’s lifelike clanker at the company’s headquarters. All they need to do to get their son back is submit family photos and fill in a questionnaire––Koreeda’s screenplay is uninterested in any specific details otherwise, remaining as broad and vague as possible, even when we later see the technicians building the bot in flashback. This would be fine if the family drama were intriguingly drawn out once their “son” returned home. This is also undercooked, with the biggest point of tension (Kensuke’s hostility towards this new “Roomba” in their home) resolved as soon as it’s introduced, after he discovers the Kakeru droid shares his son’s trait of memorizing every station on Tokyo’s Enoden train line.
Barely half an hour in, and with a happy domestic life reestablished––every other family member reintroduced to Kakeru brushes any existential concerns off almost immediately after some conflict threatens to emerge––Koreeda’s screenplay develops a tendency to have characters reference the themes he’s interested in via overwrought dialogue instead of organically explore them through the story itself. It’s the kind of movie that will pause to have a character question “who do the dead belong to?” without that sentiment puncturing the formulaic family drama or recontextualizing it as something darker than a simple wish-fulfillment story. Yet Sheep in the Box has visual motifs that suggest Koreeda took the same thoughtful approach to this subject matter as we’d come to expect, leaning on Otone’s status as an architect to suggest a home life every bit as artificially constructed as the son she’s eager to welcome back with open arms. Approaching that instinctively human urge to reconnect with a loved one through a welcome cynicism doesn’t come naturally to Koreeda beyond a few gestures, though he does have it in him. His underrated noir riff The Third Murder doesn’t preoccupy itself with finding glimmers of hope in an uncharacteristically brutal murder mystery. He stays within the bounds of his comfort zone here, resulting in something not only unrevelatory, but deeply naive.
Sheep in the Box‘s second half introduces a gang of homeless android children, not too dissimilar to the abandoned youths of his 2004 masterwork Nobody Knows, who kidnapped the family’s cat Othello in the hope of luring Kakeru to join them living on the margins of society, where they won’t be treated as manifestations of memories but living beings. It’s the biggest swing––and biggest miss––in a sci-fi story that otherwise seems reluctant to flesh out any specifics of its near-future world, and this sole high concept he allows himself doesn’t add further depth to existential ideas. AI sentience is too well-worn a theme for a director this uninterested in science fiction as a genre, who can’t push it beyond obvious talking points from sheer lack of interest. It’s especially maddening when he’s already dealt with similar themes to much greater effect in 2009’s Air Doll, and has proven one of the most reliable living filmmakers on stories of families both biological and nuclear, but a glass-half-full approach stops him from realizing this material’s potential.
Just circle back to the inciting incident in the plot: a company that regularly haunts the funerals of families who have lost young children trying to coax them into testing their product without offering them a private space to grieve. It’s a late-capitalist nightmare that should be seen with a darkly satirical eye; Koreeda treats it as quaintly as the fantastical service that preserves your favorite memory in After Life, unwilling to examine the bleakness that exists within the story’s margins. He’s a director who has successfully made us face up to unimaginable darkness, but here seems to evade exploring it himself. It’s an unsatisfying misfire.
Sheep in the Box opens in theaters on July 24.