Few filmmakers have examined the meaning of family with more patience than Hirokazu Kore-eda. His films return to parents and children separated by blood, law, poverty, guilt, and chance. Sheep in the Box appears, at first, to offer an ideal extension of that work. It asks whether a family can be rebuilt through technology, and whether love directed toward a copy can still belong to the person who was lost.
Otone and Kensuke are grieving the death of their young son, Kakeru, when a company called REbirth offers them a humanoid made in his image. The new Kakeru has been constructed from photographs, videos, memories, and behavioral data. He looks like their child and speaks like him, but the film never allows the resemblance to settle into comfort. Every familiar gesture creates a second absence.
Haruka Ayase plays Otone with a composed determination that is difficult to read. She accepts the humanoid quickly and tries to restore domestic routine around him. Daigo gives Kensuke a rougher, more suspicious energy. He cannot decide whether the machine is an insult, a miracle, or a tool that might answer questions the real Kakeru no longer can. Their disagreement gives the film its strongest material because neither response is treated as obviously correct.
Rimu Kuwaki has the film's most delicate assignment as Kakeru. The performance avoids obvious mechanical behavior. The strangeness comes from precision: a pause held slightly too long, an expression that appears correct without feeling spontaneous, a child's voice delivering affection with no clear sense of where it began. Kore-eda is usually brilliant with young actors, and Kuwaki's stillness creates an unease the screenplay rarely matches.
The title comes from The Little Prince, in which a drawing of a box allows the viewer to imagine the sheep hidden inside it. Kore-eda uses that idea to ask what people project onto an artificial person. Otone and Kensuke do not simply receive a replacement child. They fill him with memory, expectation, guilt, and the desperate hope that imagination can become restoration.
Every familiar gesture creates a second absence.
Those ideas should be devastating. Too often, the film keeps them at a clinical distance. Kore-eda's restraint has produced some of his most powerful scenes in the past, but here the emotional flatness becomes difficult to distinguish from underdevelopment. The parents react to an impossible event with a calm that may be intended as shock, yet the film rarely gives that numbness enough texture to feel lived in.
The near-future setting also remains strangely incomplete. REbirth operates from the kind of white corporate space that immediately signals hidden motives, but its purpose, ethics, and place in society are only lightly explored. The film introduces larger questions about abandoned humanoids, autonomy, and the commercial management of grief, then moves away before any one thread becomes fully convincing.
At 126 minutes, Sheep in the Box has room to deepen its central relationship. Instead, it keeps widening. A mystery surrounding Kakeru's death, Kensuke's private guilt, and the broader world of artificial children compete for attention. Several of these ideas are strong enough to support their own film. Together, they make this one feel uncertain about where its emotional center belongs.
There are still flashes of Kore-eda's gift. He remains attentive to the way family life is built from routine rather than declarations. A shared meal, a game, or an awkward pause can briefly make the humanoid's presence feel ordinary. Those moments create the movie's most unsettling question: if the performance of family becomes convincing enough, does its origin matter?
The film never finds a satisfying answer, which is not the problem. The problem is that its questions remain more affecting than the people asking them. Sheep in the Box reaches for the emotional and philosophical weight of A.I. Artificial Intelligence and After Yang, but its speculative machinery overwhelms the domestic observation that should make it distinctly Kore-eda's.
