SHEEP IN THE BOX: 2 ½ STARS. “lives in the shadow of other movies.”
SYNOPSIS: In “Sheep in the Box,” a tender Japanese sci-fi drama now playing in theatres, a heartbroken couple welcomes a humanoid AI replica of their late son into their home.
CAST: Haruka Ayase, Daigo Yamamoto, Rimu Kuwaki. Written, directed and edited by Hirokazu Koreeda.
REVIEW: Set sometime in the near future, the trauma drama “Sheep in the Box” is a half-baked study in the effects of grief.
Two years after losing their seven-year-old son Kakeru in an accident, architect Otone (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) are struggling to move on with their lives. “Even if you can’t see him,” says Otone, “he’s by your side.”
When they are approached by ReBirth, a company that creating generative AI humanoid replicas of deceased loved ones, with the offer of a free prototype, they are initially renunciant but the lure of having their son, or a close replica, in their lives again proves too much to resist. “You’re not ready to forget,” whispers a ReBirth ad. “At ReBirth we recognize that feeling.”
An exact match for their late son, the robotic child (Rimu Kuwaki) bonds with them, but as life returns to “normal” the couple, and Kakeru, come to understand that technology cannot replace human connection.
In her professional life as an architect Otone talks about blending wood and glass in harmony with one another. In her personal life she looks for harmony and relief by incorporating technology into her personal grief. It’s an interesting idea, and a timely one given our increasing reliance on new tech. Trouble is, it feels been-there-done-that given the existence of movies like “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” “Astro Boy,” “After Yang” and even “M3GAN.”
“Sheep in the Box” lives in the shadow of those movies. Director Hirokazu Koreeda “auteurs” the heck out of this thing, also serving as writer and editor, but doesn’t breathe much new life into the story of an artificial boy or the question of whether a replacement humanoid child can act as a balm after the loss of a child.
There are interesting moments. His description of robot Kakeru as being “born from death” is evocative and poignant phraseology but the overall themes of grief and resurrecting and the bottom line questions of, “Can a relationship between a machine and a human ever really be a two-way street,” are lost in a story that fires off in too many directions and obscures the story’s emotional core.
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