Sheep in the Box (2026)

The film offers a thoughtful but scattershot and overly sentimental reflection on AI and grief, with undeniable heart and charm despite its flaws.

Koreeda's film about grieving parents adopting an AI child is shallow and flat despite some touching moments, muffling its themes.

The critic notes the film takes place in a near future where a bereaved couple leases a robot copy of their deceased child, exploring themes from The Little Prince about projecting desires onto the imaginary.

The critic finds the film plodding and unclear in its stance on AI and grief, with domestic drama that dodders and fails to generate meaningful friction or insight despite warm aesthetics.

The critic finds the film beautifully made with strong direction, cinematography and performances but thematically woolly, lacking emotional payoff and feeling like a minor entry in the director's canon.

The critic views it as an emotionally stilted riff on A.I. that begs audiences not to delegate imaginations to AI but lacks feeling in its grief drama.

The critic finds it a rare misfire from Kore-eda, with the AI premise leading to familiar but uncompelling observations that feel outdated and emotionally shallow. The drama falls into an uncanny valley, remaining artificial despite lovely scoring.

The critic finds the film cloying and obvious in its sentimental exploration of AI and grief, extending undue grace to AI characters in a dubious narrative.

The critic finds the film a bafflingly unsatisfying muddle that fails to work as either sci-fi dystopia or parental grief drama. Kore-eda’s quiet style is ill-suited to the material about AI robot children replacing a dead son.

The critic notes that Kore-eda's turn to android sci-fi feels like a natural extension of his themes of absence and loss, comparing the robot boy's story to A.I. Artificial Intelligence while highlighting a brief gut-punch of emotion. Everything else in the film feels artificial.

The review calls the film a sweetly wan sci-fi parable that mostly just sits there, with little structure or commitment despite its high-concept premise of an AI replacement child. It feels gauzy and noncommittal on questions of humanity and the soul.

The critic calls it one of Kore-eda’s purest, most dreamlike films, a light yet profound study of grief that turns dystopian AI elements into a cathartic fairytale allegory of loss and rebirth. Special praise goes to the extraordinary performances, especially Haruka Ayase.

The review describes the film as a lo-fi stunner and gentle, wistful poem that steers away from sci-fi tropes to explore how technology can both help and hinder the mourning process. It highlights Kore-eda’s humanist approach to grief, parenting, and accepting the dead’s independence.

The review finds tenderness and earned emotions in the story of grief, technology, and replacement but criticizes the film for remaining too reserved and not fully reckoning with its painful ideas. It notes some complex grace notes and ambiguities but ultimately deems it one of Kore-eda's slighter recent works that could have dreamed bigger.

The critic praises Kore-eda for crafting a hopeful fable about unlikely families from a dystopian premise of replacing lost children with humanoids. However, the review faults an underdeveloped subplot about discarded robots and the film's over-indulged length, though nuanced performances provide some saving grace.