‘Sheep in the Box’ Review: All in All You’re Just Another Sheep in the Box

To what could’ve been Hirokazu Kore-eda’s anti-Black Mirror episode, is best left to ponder as not much of the pondering is visible in the screenplay of the film: a film about an AI child who ends up becoming the locus in the void of a family that lost their kid in a hit-and-run accident. Read the synopsis below:

In a near-future Japan of delivery drones and diet-monitoring fridges, REbirth has devised the ultimate remedy for grieving parents: a ‘replacement’ in the form of an anthropomorphic robot. Two years prior, an accident took architect Otone and carpenter Kensuke’s son Kakeru; when REbirth offers them a free trial, Otone doesn’t hesitate. While she becomes enamoured of the revived Kakeru, Kensuke is sceptical: “It’s a Tamagotchi. It’s a Roomba.” Gradually, they learn that making do is not the same as moving on.

The only thing to be taken for granted in this world is parental love, and the humanist filmmaker that Kore-eda happens to be, he has often caught that sentiment like lighting in the bottle; and verily it’s quite unfortunate that he slips and falls in dealing the same with supposedly more demanding subject matter that nevertheless builds on top of the basic coordinates that Kore-eda has already traversed in his earlier films.

Sheep in the Box is a hard halt for Kore-eda especially after his last film, Monster, which not only happens to be one of the best films of 2023, but also boasts a very inventive screenplay, the structure of which is unlike anything in his oeuvre; and though the premise of the film may lead one to hope that director is once again out to challenge himself, he ends up getting trampled by it.

Sheepish and damp, the prolonged and artificially sustained sentiments surrounding familial bonds puts the audience and the film into a state of arrested development that sets the film into a disastrous path by virtue of the screenplay which feels as if in its early phase of conception.

Ironically it’s a better movie in terms of the concept it teases about, that is the idea of what Kore-eda’s film with such a premise could be is far more better then the film itself that Kore-eda has delivered. Kakeru might be home but Kore-eda is still on his way home and given the buzz surrounding his live action adaptation of Look Back it seems like we have to wait a while (atleast out here where this viewer resides) to see Kore-eda’s homecoming.

Sheep in the Box is directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and stars Haruka Ayase as Otone Komoto, Daigo Yamamoto as Kensuke Komoto, Rimu Kuwaki as Kakeru, Nana Seino as Alice Kotaki, and Kanichiro as Gen Hidaka.

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