In a sentenceGrief, a leased robot boy and a director too gentle to ask either of them a hard question
In a Japan of the near future, Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke (Daigo) have lost their young son. A company offers a way to keep him: a humanoid copy of the boy, Kakeru (Kuwaki Rimu), leased rather than bought, delivered to the house and set up by an engineer (Ayumu Nakajima) who explains the terms. Otone wants her child back and is prepared to pretend; Kensuke is less sure that pretending is the same as having. The boy comes home. He learns the rooms, the meals and the routines of the house, and a copy of The Little Prince becomes a thread between him and the woman who is now his mother. Beyond the house are other families who have made the same arrangement, and somewhere the machines that have been sent back.
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Kore-eda films a grieving couple leasing a robot copy of their son as if it were one of his family dramas. Haruka Ayase is the reason to stay. The film’s reluctance to ask anything hard of its premise is why it does not add up.
Hirokazu Kore-eda writes, directs and edits Sheep in the Box, 126 minutes about a couple who have lost a child and are offered a copy. Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo) do not buy the boy; they lease him, on terms an engineer (Ayumu Nakajima) sets out with the manner of a man installing a boiler. The premise belongs to science fiction and Kore-eda treats it as he treats everything, as a household. That is the interesting decision and also, over two hours, the problem. The film is gentle, well acted and often lovely to look at, and it will not commit to a single hard thought about what it has put in the spare room.
Ayase carries it. She plays Otone as a woman who has decided to believe and is watching herself do it, and the film is at its best when Kore-eda simply leaves the camera on her while the boy does something a boy would do. Ryuto Kondo shoots the house in soft daylight rather than lamplight, so that the machine child sits in the same warm light as the furniture and is never once made to look uncanny. That is a choice, and it works. We were moved, more than the reviews had led us to expect, by an early scene at the family table in which nobody says anything about what is happening and Ayase’s face says all of it; for a few minutes the film stops explaining itself and lets a mother look at what she has agreed to.
Kuwaki Rimu, as Kakeru, has the hardest job, which is to be a child and a product at once, and he mostly does it by being still. Daigo gives Kensuke a husband’s wariness without ever turning him into the villain of the house. Yuta Bandoh’s score is sparse and stays under the dialogue rather than telling us what to feel, which is more restraint than the genre usually allows itself. Sachiko Ito dresses everyone in the ordinary clothes of people who are not thinking about their clothes, so that the only thing in the frame from the future is the boy.
The trouble is what Kore-eda does with all this, which is not enough. The film raises a question about whether a copy can be loved, then a question about what the company does with the children it takes back, then a question drawn from The Little Prince about the things we invent in order to have someone to care for, and it declines to press on any of them. The strand about the returned machines is the one we most wanted, and it is the one the film leaves thinnest. The second half continues in the same key, and we will say no more about where it goes. Kore-eda cut the film himself, and a second pair of hands might have told him that 126 minutes of tact is a long time. Somewhere past the halfway mark we found ourselves patient, then aware of being patient, which is not a feeling a film about a dead child should leave you with.
Measured against his own work it is a lesser piece. Nobody Knows and Shoplifters took families that were not supposed to exist and made us defend them; the quiet in those films was under pressure from outside, from landlords and police and money. Here the pressure is a lease agreement, and the film never lets it bite. Measured against Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which put a robot boy in a grieving house a quarter of a century ago, it is calmer and kinder and has less to say.
The reviews have split hard, between those who found a dreamlike fable and those who found a muddle, and we can see both films from where we sit. The tenderness is real. So is the vagueness, and by the end the second had begun to wear down the first.
See it if you have followed Kore-eda this far and want to watch him try a new room; Ayase alone is worth an evening. Watch it at home, where its slowness reads as calm rather than drift, and where nobody will mind if you drift a little too.
The reviews are split down the middle, and the split is a wide one. Most critics find Kore-eda’s film about a bereaved couple leasing a robot copy of their dead son handsomely made and kindly meant; the praise gathers around the performances, with Haruka Ayase singled out, and around the direction, photography and score. Even the cooler notices grant it warmth, and several call it touching in places.
The reservations are about what the film thinks. A majority find it woolly on the questions its premise raises, unwilling to say what it makes of a machine child, and so muffled rather than moving; the words sentimental and cloying recur. Some judge the quiet domestic style a poor fit for the material. The spread runs from Deadline, which calls it among Kore-eda’s purest and most dreamlike work, and The Wrap, nearly as warm, to six outright negative notices, with The Guardian finding it fails as both science fiction and grief drama.
The film offers a thoughtful but scattershot and overly sentimental reflection on AI and grief, with undeniable heart and charm despite its flaws.
Read the full review →Koreeda's film about grieving parents adopting an AI child is shallow and flat despite some touching moments, muffling its themes.
Read the full review →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.
Read the full review →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.
Read the full review →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.
Read the full review →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.
Read the full review →
A.I. Artificial IntelligenceSpielberg’s robot boy wants his mother back, and the film has the nerve to follow him.
After Yang · not reviewed yetA family loses its android son and finds his memories; quieter and sharper than this.
SolarisTarkovsky gives a widower a copy of his wife and refuses to make it easy.
Still Walking · not reviewed yetKore-eda on a family and a dead son with no machines and every hard question asked.
Marjorie Prime · not reviewed yetA hologram of a dead husband, a chamber piece, and grief argued rather than soothed.
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