‘Sheep in the Box’ Review: A Married Couple Adopt a Robot Copy of Their Dead Son in Hirokazu Koreeda’s Emotionally Stilted Riff on ‘A.I.’
Hirokazu Koreeda's 'Sheep in the Box' follows a grieving couple who adopt a robot replica of their deceased son, exploring how technology intersects with memory and loss. Unlike Koreeda's more emotionally resonant works, the film deliberately restrains sentimentality, focusing instead on emotional avoidance. The robot child serves not as a replacement but as a static, interactive reminder of the past, highlighting the limitations of artificial consciousness in healing grief.
- ▪The film centers on a married couple in near-future Kamakura who receive a humanoid AI modeled after their dead seven-year-old son.
- ▪Unlike in 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence,' the robot child in 'Sheep in the Box' does not express deep emotions or love, but exists as a passive presence.
- ▪The robot has technical limitations, such as shutting down if it moves more than 30 meters from a parent and being unable to eat, bathe, or grow.
- ▪Koreeda frames the robot as a 'placeholder' for memory rather than a true substitute for the lost child.
- ▪The couple had already reached a degree of emotional acceptance before receiving the robot, which complicates their response to its presence.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A master sentimentalist like Hirokazu Koreeda riffing on a movie as soul-obliterating as Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” sounds like a surefire recipe for the tear-jerker of the year, so I was surprised to discover that “Sheep in the Box” is one of the most emotionally stunted dramas the “Monster” auteur has ever made. To some extent, that’s by design, as the original script’s two major human characters — a fortysomething married couple in sunny near-future Kamakura — start to lose their place in the grieving process after they adopt an AI-powered humanoid modeled after their dead seven-year-old son.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at IndieWire.
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