YNOT at the Movies

Renowned write-director Hirokazu Koreeda's new film "Sheep in the Box" (箱の中の羊 | Japan 2026 | in Japanese | 126 min.) has many ingredients of his best work: a grieving family, a watchful child, an unresolved wound. What it doesn't have is the effort to pick a direction and follow it.

Koreeda has covered this emotional territory before, and covered it better. "After Life" (1998) turned death into a philosophical puzzle box. "Still Walking" (2008) and "Shoplifters" (2018) found the drama inside ordinary family routines. "Nobody Knows" (2004) and "Monster" (2023) both trusted children to carry the story itself. A film about android replacements for the dead has also already been made brilliantly, in Kogonada's "After Yang" (2021). "Sheep in the Box" "Sheep in the Box" seems to want to be all of these films at once, touching on grief, family, childhood friendship, and artificial intelligence in turn, but it never settles into any one of them long enough to say something new.

Two years after losing their young son Kakeru, architect Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke Komoto (Daigo Yamamoto), a carpenter, bring a humanoid modeled on their dead Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) into their home. The company that built the humanoid rents these replacements out to bereaved families. The robot looks, moves, and talks exactly like Kakeru, and Otone welcomes him readily while Kensuke resists. His presence starts to bring back some sense of the old time in the house, even if Kensuke's early resentment makes clear that nothing about this is actually normal. Watching that dynamic shift between the humanoid and the parents is the most interesting thing in the film, but it also drags up wounds and regrets neither parent has dealt with.

The director has said the film grew out of news stories about Chinese companies using generative AI to revive the dead, and about a Japanese broadcast that used similar technology to bring back a deceased singer for a new performance. He's drawn the title from the novel "The Little Prince," using it as a way of asking whether something invisible, such as a soul, survives inside a machine built to look like a lost child. But the film raises that question and then declines to follow through on it.

The future depicted in the film doesn't extend past the humanoid himself. Everything else, the houses, the offices, the TV news reports about children going missing, looks like the present. That narrowness might have worked if the film used its restraint to dig into the parents' grief instead, but it hedges there too, and the result is a story with likeable people in an intriguing situation that never risks going anywhere uncomfortable.

Ayase plays Otone's need to believe with real tenderness, and Yamamoto, better known in Japan as a comedian than an actor, finds a wary, unshowy resistance in Kensuke that suits the character's slower path toward accepting the robot. The film's real discovery is Rimu Kuwaki, making his screen debut as Kakeru's humanoid after being chosen out of two hundred children who auditioned. Koreeda has always had a gift for directing kids, and he gets something genuinely eerie and touching out of Kuwaki, who has to play warmth and a faint, unplaceable wrongness in the same scene.

As in most of Koreeda's films, there's no real villain here, aside from the implied threat of child abductors mentioned on the news. He'd rather make you feel for everyone in the frame than give you someone to root against, and that instinct still works even when the larger story doesn't.

It's frustrating to watch this film from a director who's usually so sure-footed, but even for this lesser Koreeda film, it has more feeling in it than most, and there's enough tenderness and craft here to make it worth seeing, especially for the director's longtime admirers.

"Sheep in the Box" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, July 31, 2026.