4 min readCannesMay 18, 2026 12:36 PM IST
Sheep In The Box movie review: There cannot be anything more timely than the premise of Hirokazu Koreeda’s Cannes Competition entry, ‘Sheep In The Box’, which deals with the evolving nature of grief in the age of AI: a couple who’ve lost their young son bring home a humanoid android, who looks and sounds exactly like their boy.
It is when Kakeru ( Rimu Kuwaki) begins to show signs of thinking like their son that Otone ( Ayase Haruka) and Kensuke ( Daigo Yamamoto) start wondering about the larger implications of their actions. The question- does a machine have a soul– has been at the heart of such discussions for a long time.
Those with long memories may remember famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov toying with the revolutionary idea (at the time of his writing from the 30s to the 50s) of sentient robots from his earliest work. Phillip K Dick, who many thought carried Asimov’s legacy forward, wrote his legendary book in 1968, which was called ‘Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep’. I wouldn’t be surprised if Koreeda’s title is a variation.
Sheep In The Box movie trailer:
Back in those days, it must have felt that this kind of thing was safely in the future, but the rapid developments in AI have made everything possible. The film is set ‘sometime in the near future’, where drones are used domestically, and microwave dinners appear to have replaced the labour of endless cooking. But being able to replace an actual human with a robot, without it creating challenges, is easier said than done: you may be able to replicate human DNA, but can you allay grief? What happens to memories vested in the one who’s gone? Is grief now a commodity?
Dad Kinsuke is a little more sceptical and resistant around the new entrant. But Mom Otone has suspended disbelief much faster: you can see her melt when Kakeru 2.0 says, I’m home’. When this version Kakeru needs ‘charging’, he sits on a chair; he also cannot go off too far because the tracker in his system stops sending signals. It’s all quite sweet, with both parents trying to adjust to their new reality: it’s when Otone’s meddling mom, and sister (with her kids) show up without warning, that the s—t hits the fan.
On the one hand is the shock and horror of the humans. On the other is Kakeru’s discovery that a silent rebellion has been brewing amongst his kind, and a bunch of android kids are gathering together in a shed, to plot and plan. At this point, the film could have swerved off the family territory, and gone to more complicated place: complex human relations have been at the beating heart of Koreeda’s best work, which has argued that it isn’t always blood that binds; the connection could be as strong, if not stronger, amongst those who think alike.
But this is one of those rare Koreeda’s films which fail to dig deeper and come up with the kind of truth bombs he teases out of his stories. Faint promise emerges when the concept of wooden blocks carrying memories of their source (trees being the source of life) starts to get a bit of play, but even that turns into bland exchanges between mother and son.
Hirokazu Koreeda’s ‘Sheep in the Box’, about a young boy and his humanoid siblings, received a somewhat tepid ovation lasting four minutes pic.twitter.com/JmJttCk9ea
— Deadline (@DEADLINE) May 16, 2026
In some ways, there’s an ET-go-home vibe in the way the androids band together, and it could truly have become an exploration of how humans and ultra-smart machines will have to learn to co-exist in coming times. But there’s little depth on display, and we are left with a film which belies its potential to be extraordinary, by staying disappointingly mundane.
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Sheep In The Box movie cast: Daigo Yamamoto, Ayase Haruka, Rimu Kuwaki
Sheep In The Box movie director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Sheep In The Box movie rating: 2 stars
