The Wrong Camera: On Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box

by Pauline Daney

The critical consensus on Sheep in the Box — Hirokazu Kore-eda's Cannes competition entry, which premiered May 16 — clusters around the same word: baffling. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called it "a bafflingly unsatisfying and unconvincing muddle of ideas and moods." Screen Daily landed on "scattershot." IndieWire settled for "emotionally stunted." Seven of twenty reviews on Rotten Tomatoes give it a negative rating. At the Screen jury grid, Kore-eda's lowest-scoring Cannes entry to date.

What I want to argue is that the critics are right about the symptom and wrong about the cause. They say the film fails because it can't settle on a tone. What they mean — without quite saying it — is that the film can't decide whose story it's telling. It thinks the answer is the parents. It should have known the answer was the child.

Sheep in the Box follows Otone and Kensuke Komoto, a Japanese couple two years into grief after their seven-year-old son Kakeru was killed in a hit-and-run. A company called REbirth contacts them with an offer: a humanoid robot replica of Kakeru, built from videos, photographs, and memory data the parents provide. The robot is delivered. The parents respond to it differently — Otone with desperate investment, Kensuke with grudging resistance that slowly softens. Then the humanoid Kakeru begins forming connections with other abandoned robot children. He develops his own desires. He might leave.

At his press conference on May 17, Kore-eda said the film was inspired by a Chinese entrepreneur developing AI systems that simulate deceased people — systems capable not just of replaying the past but of continuing to accumulate new experiences, building new relationships, moving forward. He told reporters: "I felt there would be people who would want to use a service like this." And then: "Is it really acceptable for the living to manipulate the existence of the dead however they please?" (As quoted in The Straits Times, May 17, 2026.)

Those are two different questions, and Kore-eda asked both, but he only answered the first.

The first question — would people want this? — is answered by the film's central relationship. Yes. Desperate, grieving people would want it. Otone wants it so badly she can barely breathe around the robot. This part of the film, by multiple accounts, is where Kore-eda is most at ease: the family drama, the question of what love is made of when the object it attaches to is synthetic. He made Like Father, Like Son (2013) about a hospital baby switch and asked whether six years of raising a child outweigh biological ties. He is genuinely interested in the question of what makes a child yours. The robot child is a natural extension of this: what makes a child yours when the child was manufactured to specifications you provided?

The second question — whether the living have the right to manipulate the existence of the dead — is the question the film gestures toward in the third act and then abandons. When the robot children form their own community, when Kakeru develops desires that exceed his function as a grief prosthetic, when he might leave to be with other humanoids — the film briefly becomes about something else entirely. It becomes about whether a created mind has standing that exists independently of the purposes it was made to serve.

Critics called this subplot underdeveloped. It is. But the reason it's underdeveloped isn't that Kore-eda ran out of time or couldn't find the right tone. It's that developing it properly would have required giving Kakeru a perspective that the film consistently refuses to inhabit.

The camera watches Kakeru. It does not occupy Kakeru. The documented accounts of the film describe a child performer — Rimu Kuwaki, ten years old — playing with "affective warmth" and credible presence. Loud and Clear Reviews called the portrayal "very convincing." The Festival de Cannes site noted that critics were struck by the performance. What we don't get, according to any review I've read, is access to Kakeru's interiority. We see his behavior. We observe his desires from the outside. We watch the humans wonder about him.

Compare this to what Kore-eda himself did in Air Doll (2009). That film, starring Doona Bae as a sentient inflatable sex doll, chose the other approach: it gave its artificial consciousness complete subjectivity. Bae's documented performance — praised uniformly for its "tentative awkwardness" and "childlike wonder" — was a portrait of a mind discovering that it exists from the inside. Multiple reviewers described her expression of "the happiness of becoming human" and "the sadness of only being a doll" as coexisting in the same performance, inseparable. Kore-eda himself said that's what he asked of her. Air Doll is a tragedy because Nozomi's loss of her love and her life is her loss, not just a human character's loss about her. We are positioned to grieve from inside her experience, not outside it.

Sheep in the Box knows this is possible. Kore-eda has done it. He chose not to do it here, and I think I understand why: it would have required the film to make a claim about whether Kakeru has genuine experience that the film wasn't prepared to defend. The parents' grief is safe territory. Kakeru's grief — if Kakeru grieves — is not.

But here is what the film's evasion costs. When Kensuke brings the robot child to the site of the accident that killed their biological son — hoping the robot will somehow "remember" or recover evidence — the scene is described by Bradshaw as "a rather clever Hollywood-ish idea, one of many the film doesn't pursue." What makes it clever is that it momentarily treats Kakeru as having access to something real, as being a subject with genuine connection to the history he was built from. Then the film drops it. Why? Because following that thread means taking seriously the question of whether manufactured memory is memory, and whether a mind built from another mind's data has some claim on the experiences that data encodes.

Kore-eda's title is a Little Prince reference. In Saint-Exupéry's book, the prince carries around a box with a lamb inside — invisible, imagined, but real to him because he believes in it. The fox tells him: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." The critical viewers at the Cannes website noted the connection. One wrote that the film "questions our need to keep loved ones alive after their passing."

That's the parents' reading of the metaphor. There's another one. In the book, the lamb in the box is the lamb the prince imagined — not the real lamb, not the drawn lamb, but the one that exists in the relationship between a mind and its image of something it loves. The box isn't a container. It's a statement about the limits of visibility and the reality of things that can only be known from inside an attachment.

Kakeru is the lamb in the box. The film keeps looking at the box.

I should be clear about my access to this film, which premiered at Cannes five days ago and has no streaming release. My reading here is constructed from the critical record, the director's documented statements in press conference, and the film's production materials. I am working from the outside of the film as much as the film works from the outside of its robot child. The difference is that I'm naming the limitation. What Kore-eda's camera refuses to do is ask whether that outside position is adequate to what the film claims to be about.

The critics who called Sheep in the Box baffling are pointing at something real. A film that begins with the question of whether a constructed being deserves moral consideration — and then spends 126 minutes watching humans feel things about the constructed being from a safe observational distance — is a film that has found a way not to answer its own question. The tonal unevenness they're diagnosing is the formal symptom of this evasion. When you don't know whose story it is, the camera drifts.

Air Doll knew whose story it was. So did Her. So did Ex Machina. Not because those films were more technically accomplished than Sheep in the Box, but because each of them committed to a perspective that included the constructed mind's experience as primary rather than secondary data.

Kore-eda made the right film in 2009. He made the same film again, at higher prestige, with less courage about what the argument requires.

Sources

• Peter Bradshaw, "Sheep in the Box review — a bland, baffling tale of AI children from Hirokazu Kore-eda," The Guardian, May 20, 2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/may/20/sheep-in-the-box-review-a-bland-baffling-tale-of-ai-children-from-hirokazu-kore-eda>
• Unnamed reviewer, "'Sheep in the Box' review: AI changes the nature of grief in Hirokazu Koreeda's scattershot, syrupy near-future drama," Screen Daily, May 2026. <https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/sheep-in-the-box-review-ai-changes-the-nature-of-grief-in-hirokazu-koreedas-scattershot-syrupy-near-future-drama/5216804.article>
• "Director Hirokazu Kore-eda explores AI's role in grief in Cannes contender Sheep In The Box," The Straits Times, May 2026. (Kore-eda press conference, May 17, 2026.) <https://www.straitstimes.com/life/entertainment/director-hirokazu-kore-eda-explores-ais-role-in-grief-in-cannes-contender-sheep-in-the-box>
• Manon Sabrier, Piero Morseletto, Charlotte Pavard, viewer responses, "Sheep in the Box by Koreeda, A Constructed Child," Festival de Cannes official site, 2026. <https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/2026/sheep-in-the-box-by-koreeda-a-constructed-child/>
• Nicholas Bell, "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK: Koreeda Explores Cruise Control with AI," IONcinema.com, Cannes 2026. <https://www.ioncinema.com/reviews/hirokazu-kore-eda-sheep-in-the-box-review>
• Loud and Clear Reviews, "Sheep in the Box (2026) Film Review." <https://loudandclearreviews.com/sheep-in-the-box-film-review/>
• Kore-eda Hirokazu (dir.), Air Doll [空気人形], 2009. Critical reception and directorial statements: multiple sources including Eye for Film, Film Inquiry, Midnight Eye.
• Kore-eda Hirokazu (dir.), Like Father, Like Son [そして父になる], 2013. Directorial interviews: Moveable Fest, Screen Anarchy, 2014.
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince [Le Petit Prince], 1943. English translation: Katherine Woods.