Sheep in – Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes Main Competition premiere follows Otone and Kensuke after they lose their son, Kakeru, and decide to welcome a humanoid robot built from the deceased. By pairing natural light, drones, and a gentle critique of how people hold onto th
Hirokazu Kore-eda doesn’t just ask what happens when androids can look like your loved ones.. In “Sheep in the Box. ” which premiered on Saturday in the Main Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. he places that unsettling possibility inside an intimate story about facing death and the uneven way technology can shape mourning.
From the opening moments, the film signals exactly the kind of iconography it’s circling.. The camera pans across Yokohama, with architecture tucked into verdant countryside where people feel barely noticeable.. A title then frames the setting as a “not so distant future.” In the same span. a drone carrying an unknown package enters the frame. crossing paths with another moving in the opposite direction—an early reminder that the world is moving. even if the human moments feel smaller.
That balance—technology. nature. and humanity sharing the same space without equal weight—becomes the background music for the film’s central couple: Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke Komoto (Daigo Yamamoto).. Otone works as an architect. and the movie gives time to their home and how it sits alongside surrounding trees and foliage.. Nights, lit by little natural brightness, can feel lonelier as a result.. There’s a grief at the center of that quiet: the couple has recently lost their son. Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki). and their mourning is what pulls the story into its core premise.
Otone receives an advertisement—sent by one of the delivery robots from earlier in the film—that creates humanoid robots of deceased loved ones.. The couple chooses to welcome a robot of Kakeru.. Kensuke is initially skeptical, and the rental being complimentary does the convincing.. While they wait, he grumbles, “People’s misfortunes can be profitable.”
Kore-eda builds most of the runtime around what happens after that decision. letting the robotic Kakeru move through the couple’s routines as the emotional experiment of the film.. On the surface, the android is a perfect physical replica of the son Otone and Kensuke lost.. But the technology’s limitations keep the gap visible.. When they learn they can set certain intelligence settings on Kakeru and that he needs to sit in a charging chair when his power is low. Kensuke reacts with the blunt comparison: they’ve been gifted a combination of a “Tamagachi and a Roomba.”
The robot’s earnestness to learn is clear, but it has not lived the life of the real Kakeru.. Otone tries to get the humanoid caught up to speed, yet even she confronts the absurdity of the task.. She points out that her humanoid “son” doesn’t like green peppers or praying mantises—traits that made up her human son’s personality—now reduced to lines of data to be fed into an automaton replacement.
What Kore-eda refuses to do is turn anyone into a villain.. “It’s nobody’s fault a child died. ” someone says. and while that statement lands as an easy absolution. the film shows why parents can’t hold onto it.. For Kensuke and Otone, making themselves responsible becomes a way to take control of what happened to Kakeru.. It’s described as a far better alternative than imagining the child’s passing as an unexplainable act of violence.
Parents, in the world of the film, carry guilt over what they believe they failed to protect and properly care for. Their affection isn’t presented as delusion—it’s portrayed as something with redemptive possibility. They see the new son as a vessel for their love, a way to atone for past failures.
But vessels aren’t flexible.. The tension comes when Kakeru wants to go off script. taking his growth in directions that don’t match the human Kakeru’s life.. Without framing the story in an apocalyptic warning about machines taking over humanity. Kore-eda offers a gentle critique of the ways we don’t give the dead their peace when we keep seeing their passing through the prism of tragedy.
“Who do the dead belong to?” a character asks.. Kore-eda doesn’t provide a concrete answer. but the film keeps returning to the question of whether people keep the gone ones captive by refusing to accept that they can blossom into new forms.. The movie suggests that they don’t have to remain static memories. and they don’t have to become humanoid androids.. In the end. “Sheep in the Box” lands as a slight and wistful poem about holding grief—one shaped by technology. and one that still insists on the humanity underneath it.
Hirokazu Kore-eda Sheep in the Box Cannes Film Festival Main Competition androids artificial intelligence grief found family Haruka Ayase Daigo Yamamoto Rimu Kuwaki