Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film Sheep in the Box uses a familiar tech nightmare, a dead child returned as an artificial copy, and steers it into quieter territory: what a family does when grief becomes something a company can package.
The Palme d’Or-winning director of Shoplifters told The Verge that the film grew out of real-world efforts to use AI in mourning. Kore-eda cited examples in Japan, Korea and China, including an AI recreation of a deceased singer performing a new song, a Korean project involving a dead child recreated for her parents, and businesses using AI to simulate people who have died.
Sheep in the Box follows parents who lose their seven-year-old son, Kakeru, in an accident. In the film’s near-future setting, an AI company offers them a humanoid version of the child, a robotic double that appears human. The setup sounds like a Black Mirror episode waiting to file a complaint with HR. Kore-eda’s interest, by his account, is narrower and more human: how that technology alters the shape of mourning for a couple trying to rebuild family life.
Kore-eda has returned to grief throughout his career, beginning with his first feature, Maborosi. He told The Verge that reading Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work helped shape that earlier film, but said he no longer thinks grief moves through a neat sequence. His view now is that mourning varies from person to person.
Memory, but cleaned for input
The film’s AI version of Kakeru does not receive memory in the messy way people carry it. Kore-eda said the memories given to the humanoid child are selected by the parents. That distinction matters. In his telling, once memory is separated from the body and converted into data, it no longer works like lived recall, with all the emotion and involuntary association that comes with being human.
Kore-eda also did some basic technical due diligence, which already puts the movie ahead of a lot of AI fiction. He said he spoke with a robotics expert while writing the script. The expert told him humanoid robots would face a serious heat problem because smooth movement and information processing would generate heat that would be hard to release.
The film sidesteps that problem. Kore-eda said he set aside the heat issue so the story could function, and made the humanoids independent of human needs such as eating and drinking. He framed that choice as a narrative device, not an engineering claim.
The same expert also told Kore-eda that convincing humanoid robots would be unlikely because robots and humans are built differently: people have internal organs and bone structure, while robots are constructed from the outside. According to Kore-eda, the expert said that if ethics were ignored, human clones might arrive before truly humanlike robots. Kore-eda called that prospect more frightening than robots, especially given that pet cloning already exists.
ChatGPT was flattering, not useful
Kore-eda said AI has entered his own daily routine mostly through translation tools, which he uses to turn Japanese into English for messages. He also tested ChatGPT on the Sheep in the Box script. According to Kore-eda, the chatbot praised each revision and predicted the film would get into Cannes, first in Un Certain Regard, then in competition after his producer identified him as Hirokazu Kore-eda.
The film did make the Cannes competition, but Kore-eda did not sound converted. He said a person could have offered the same prediction, and that the exchange lacked the human context that would make feedback useful.
His larger concern is the productivity mindset around AI and production technology. Kore-eda said filmmaking is already shifting away from some physical practices, including road-shot driving scenes and stunt work, toward studio compositing, visual effects and potentially AI. He said he used studio compositing for a driving scene in Sheep in the Box, but found the process uninteresting enough that he may avoid writing scenes that require it.
Sheep in the Box is scheduled to open in select theaters Friday, July 24.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
