Japanese auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu returns to competition at Cannes with “Sheep in the Box,” a thorny yet sensitive meditation on the encroachment of AI on our ability to let go of those who are no longer with us. In the film, Otone (Ayase Haruka) and Kensuke (Yamamoto Daigo) adopt a humanoid android (Kuwaki Rimu) who resembles their late son, Kakeru.
“To think about AI is to think about humanity,” Kore-eda tells Variety. “My earlier film, ‘Air Doll,’ was also about the dynamics between humans and non-humans, but here the non-human is also the dead. I was interested in AI before I began, but I found myself gravitating towards it as I developed the project.”
Kore-eda came across an article about a Chinese business that brings people “back to life” by feeding information about them into a computer. “I have my own regrets about things that I was not able to tell my mother, so I understand people who regret not having been able to communicate enough,” he says. “At the same time, it’s ethically precarious for the living to use the dead for their convenience. The ultimate question was this: Who do the dead belong to?”
The sandbox for this ethical exploration is the family’s home, a dynamic piece of design occupied by an architect mother and wood-manufacturing father. It is but one of many “boxes” that the title suggests. “I wasn’t well-versed in architecture,” reflects Kore-eda. “Three years ago at a film festival, I got into conversation with an architect. I wasn’t sure why Japanese architects had become so praised by the world. Apparently, it’s because we still have a lot of wooden buildings. If you give a protagonist a profession you’re not knowledgeable about, you’re forced to learn. If you look at wooden architecture from a different perspective — it’s a forest. I felt there were a lot of possibilities there.”
Kore-eda is renowned for his work with child actors, drawing out raw and naturalistic performances that pull on the heartstrings — most recently in 2023 Cannes screenplay winner “Monster.” For “Sheep in the Box,” the filmmaker auditioned 200 boys. “It’s interesting with boys,” says Kore-eda. “Every time I meet them, the acting’s different — which doesn’t happen so much with girls. Rimu is such a free soul. Sometimes he would have so much fun that — just like the humanoid in the film — it’s like his switch is flipped, and he starts sleeping. Filming stops until he recharges.”
There was something deeper that Kore-eda noticed as well. “Rimu has this duality — when his expressions are rich, and when he’s turned off,” says Kore-eda. “‘Unsettling’ may not be the appropriate word, but I think, for every mother, there’s a moment when they look at their child and think: This child is a different creature from myself.”
The universality with which Kore-eda defines “Sheep in the Box” sharpens the sense in which it reflects its cultural specificity. “How we see AI differs between East and West,” explains Kore-eda. “In the West, it’s negatively associated with dystopia, whereas in the East, it’s about co-existence between human and non-human. It’s not about symbiosis. I think AI is going to transcend humanity, and they’ll form their own community — at which point they won’t care about humans. When I came to that thought, I realized that this is a story about how children outgrow their parents. Their leaving the nest might seem sad, but our human history has been built on cycles of children transcending their parents. That brought me to the idea of a forest.”
English (US) ·